2025 Horror Part Thirteen

MOTHER OF FLIES

Dir - John Adams/Zelda Adams/Toby Poser

Overall: MEH

 

The latest from the delightful mother/daughter/father horror team of Toby Poser and Zelda and John Adams, Mother of Flies stays in their lane for better or worse.  As usual, the Adams Family, (as they humorously dub themselves), craft some grimy and striking visuals, their own gloomy goth songs are solid, and the story where Zelda's young protagonist seeks out a woodland witch to cure her of a terminal tumor indulges in plenty of earthy folk horror motifs, the kind that they frequent at least to some extent in each of their movies.  It also raises some interesting questions about the purpose of faith and the belief in the unbelievable when nothing else seems to be doing the trick.  While Zelda and John effortlessly channel their own father/daughter chemistry, (even if John's performance is curiously weak), Poser comes off like an eccentric caricature.  Her dialog is exclusively made up of Wiccan adlibs; long-winded poppycock that is vapid, overwritten, simple-minded, and pretentious, and she unfortunately gets a whole lot to say, her rhyming platitudes providing narration that is meaningless at best, maddening at worst.  Such kooky mannerisms and some arbitrarily strange and grotesque sequences forgive the ridiculous prattling on, but the premise itself rests on shaky ground.  Why a father would casually indulge his daughter partaking in such increasingly concerning shenanigans is a tough pill for the audience to swallow, and even though their script addresses these issues, it still undermines the film's nasty, unforgiving, and more impressive aspects.

 

BUGONIA

Dir - Yorgos Lanthimos

Overall: MEH

 

Renowned Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos collaborates with screenwriter Will Tracy while taking on his first remake, Bugonia serving as an updated adaptation of Jang Joon-hwan's 2003 oddball sci-fi black comedy Save the Green Planet!.  Those genre labels apply here as well, filtered of course through Lanthimos' auteuristic eccentricities, reuniting him once again with Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, and even Alicia Silverstone to a lesser extent, (the latter given a minor part as a quirky mother, something she likewise had in The Killing of a Sacred Deer).  Stone is outstanding as always, playing a corporate matriarch who comes off as perpetually manipulative and full of shit as she finds herself held within the clutches of Plemons' cartoonishly filthy peon employee and beekeeper who has a conspiratorial agenda for the books.  What works is the intense back and forth between these two parties, (with first time autistic actor Aidan Delbis caught in the mix to provide some deliberate concern from the audience), as well as the suspense-laden dangling fruit as to the legitimacy of Plemons' allegations.  Unfortunately, Tracy's script falls apart as it goes along, introducing plot gaps and inconsistent behavior amongst its characters, as well as arriving at a conclusion that is less annoying nihilistic than the work of Lars von Trier by comparison, yet still comes dangerously close.  Lanthimos is such a singular voice and so expert as his craft though that even if this is technically a miss-step, it is just barely one.

 

VADAKKAN

Dir - Sajeed A.

Overall: MEH

 

A mess of schlock, forced found footage, animated exposition, dogshit CGI, demonic possession, and folk horror, Vadakkan is the first full-length from Indian filmmaker Sajeed A., whose career up until this point was primarily in television and documentaries.  Authored by another fellow who only uses an initial for his last name, (screenwriter Unni R.), there are some interesting ideas here that deserve a less ambitious and in turn less faulty execution.  Kishore portrays a stoic paranormal investigator YouTube personality with a vaguely troubled past who looks into another YouTube personality that had a type of Big Brother haunted house program go horribly awry on a cut-off piece of land that is home to much malevolent supernatural tomfoolery.  The idea to have the second act be nothing more than Kishore watching episodes of the doomed program is a terrible one, namely because the blatantly otherworldly footage is all edited together with scary music, multiple cameras, and even ends with a long shot that is done in the conventional style as the rest of the film and ergo could not have at all been captured the way that it was.  This faux pas is enough to sink the entire production, but the third act brings Kishore, his assistant, and his former love interest to the cursed island themselves for a lengthy climax that is sloppily handled, not at all frightening, and hackneyed.  Everything is played straight and the main performers take their assignment seriously, but there are too many mistakes to forgive.

2025 Horror Part Twelve

A USEFUL GHOST

Dir - Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke

Overall: GOOD

 

One is likely to compare the singular work of Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul to the debut from fellow Thailand-operating Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, (What a name!).  A Useful Ghost, (Phi Chaidai Kh), takes a similarly quirky approach to its supernatural subject matter where characters nonchalantly react and coexist with otherworldly entities, in this case spirits who decide to posses domestic appliances.  It is a hilarious gag that gets plenty of stone-faced laughs early on, only becoming more thoughtful and intricate as it goes along.  Boonbunchachoke winds up exploring everything from matriarchal manipulation, to conservatism, to homosexual relationships, to the 2010 Bangkock protestor slayings, to beyond the grave revenge.  At the core of all this wild thematic melding is the overarching concept that tragedies and the loved ones taken by them need be remembered or else further injustice and oppression will continue to thrive.  Wisely, Boonbunchachoke does not overburden the audience with these ideas, instead letting them find their course naturally over two hours, with touching, funny, and downright bizarre moments making this one of the most unique genre movies of its kind.

 

KEEPER

Dir - Osgood Perkins

Overall: MEH

 

Filmmaker Osgood Perkins delivers another in a mostly continuous stream of stylistically engaging yet faulty horror excursions, sticking with his exclusive genre of choice and working his auteur magic, warts and all.  Keeper is Perkins' second time using a script that is not his own, choosing one from Nick Lepard to shoot quickly during downtime on the same year's The Monkey which went on hiatus due to the Writers Guild of American and SAG-AFTRA strike.  Filmed on the cheap in Canada with a minuscule stable of accomplished local actors, the movie is a refreshing slow boil that makes atmospheric stillness and some well-placed WTF strangeness the primary focus.  At this point in his behind the lens career, Perkins has a exemplary knack for such things, and it is a joy to watch how he subverts a few genre pratfalls and kicks up the intimate creepiness in the process.  Unfortunately, Lepard's script indulges in loose ends that fail the icebox test and does what almost every horror screenplay does, which is to dilly-dally around a story that should have logically been wrapped up an hour earlier, spending half of its third act deflating itself with muddled exposition, spooky monsters crawling around like spiders for no reason, and a narrative turnaround that seems to play it fast and messy with its own supernatural rules.  As is usually the case where Perkins is concerned, there is a better film lurking in here than what it delivered, but what is delivered still has plenty to recommend about it.

 

EYE FOR AN EYE

Dir - Colin Tilley

Overall: MEH

 

Prolific music video director Colin Tilley takes his first crack at a feature with the unremarkable and occasionally embarrassing Eye for an Eye, a type of country-fried A Nightmare on Elm Street that is brimful of schlock.  We have prerequisite jump scares, characters monologuing exposition while dramatically looking off in the distance, unintentionally funny set pieces, cartoonish bully behavior that is necessary for plot purposes, awful CGI, stock/loud monster sound effects, and a sloppy third act that bulldozes through rapid-fire nightmare sequences, delivering an abrupt and weak ending in the process.  As far as the performances go, Golda Rosheuvel comes off the worst due to the cringe-worthy dialog that she is given, laying on the southern drawl thick as her uneven character both laments and warns against the dangers of a local boogeyman that she has once released while also nonchalantly giving a young child the tools to unleash said boogeyman himself.  The script by Elisa Victoria and Michael Tully feels like it is missing several pieces, particularly where the pro and antagonists are concerned.  This actually may have been more satisfying if it was fleshed-out as a miniseries instead of a lone full-length, something that would have also provided a chance to deepen the mythology of its supernatural baddie.  Tilley has a showy eye for visuals, but much of what is here is either arbitrary or hackneyed at best.

2025 Horror Part Eleven

MAN FINDS TAPE
Dir - Paul Gandersman/Peter S. Hall
Overall: MEH

 

It is unfortunate that so many filmmakers go the found footage route due to rising costs and diminishing, (if even existent), box office returns, the full-length debut Man Finds Tape from the writer/director team of Paul Gandersman and Peter S. Hall being one of the most poorly-suited to the mockumentary framework to come out in recent times.  This is a bold statement since a solid case can be made that nearly every found footage movie would benefit from a more conventional and ergo more expensive approach, but it is doubly a shame here since Gandersman and Hall's narrative comes equipped with some refreshing tweaks and hooks.  Some of the "tapes" that our central figure portrayed by William Magnuson discovers are bizarre enough to make any viewer sit up straight, and it all leads in a direction that would be difficult if impossible to guess.  What does not work, (and this cannot be stated enough times with these films), is that the finished documentary-within-a-movie trajectory is both distracting and dilutes the necessary verisimilitude for any harrowing and/or otherworldly scenario to connect.  Footage from an untold amount of cameras is cobbled together over a significant period of time, and scary music, subtitles to hear the muffled parts, text messages, 911 transcripts, sound effect enhancement, talking head interviews, and a non-linear presentation come off as unintentionally comical despite the humorless tone and undeniable supernatural events captured on film.  It makes things needlessly clunky and infinitely less believable than if the finances were procured to simply do this as a "real" movie instead of one that awkwardly shoehorns itself into an oversaturated sub-genre that rarely if ever warrants being in that sub-genre.

 

INFLUENCERS

Dir - Kurtis David Harder

Overall: MEH

 

A direct sequel to 2022's Influencer, the apply titled Influencers is a disappointing follow up to its clever if only partially successful predecessor.  Director Kurtis David Harder pens the screenplay himself this time, joined once again by Cassandra Naud as the full-blown sociopath antagonist, as well as her final girl Emily Tennant who is desperate and determined to convince the world of the events of the first movie.  The structure is jumbled up, opening with a nasty throat slitting, then jumping to Naud presumably living happily ever after having been left stranded on an island last we saw her, the dropping the opening titles arriving only once the second act begins and we catch up with Tennant playing catch up with her identity-stealing murderer.  Harder keeps things easy to follow even as more timeline zig-zags happen from there, as well as plot holes collapsing upon themselves which become frustrating as things spiral into a ridiculous and schlocky finale that seems tonally divorced from what came before.  It is this lack of focus that ultimately sinks the ship.  The first film was able to make a chilling case for social media obsession via an exaggerated and comparatively less implausible scenario than what happens here, this time side-stepping pivotal information and character building in order to delight in reckless violence, manipulation, and one-upmanship.

 

ALPHA

Dir - Julia Ducournau

Overall: MEH

 

The third work from French filmmaker Julia Ducournau is both her weakest and easily most bleak, wearing its symbolism on its sleeve yet overstaying its welcome with a relentlessly dour and increasingly incoherent structure.  Arriving five years after the onset of COVID, Alpha's viral outbreak premise inescapably recalls recent times and the current aftermath of those times on a surface level, (as well as the AIDS epidemic of yesteryear), but Ducournau's script is not interested in delving into societal discontent and division as she instead remains focused on those who are trying to save, (read into "control"), those whose behavior cannot be tamed.  Well, that is one interpretation that is as good as any since one has to be generous in deciphering what Ducournau's broad intentions are here.  Golshifteh Farahani's overwrought mother who is also a nurse is simultaneously dealing with a world gone to shit where a disease turns people into crumbling marble, her thirteen-year-old daughter is rebelling and being ostracized at school, and her infected junkie brother has a death wish that she keeps interfering with.  There are other elements at play which may or may not be important, plus the story is told in a distracting manner that jumps between timelines, making it difficult not only to tell what is currently transpiring or what the point is in going back and forth in the first place.  Things get more muddled and exhausting as it goes along, with zero room for humor.  We get the picture after the first scene, and merely wallow in this word's misery from there.

2025 Horror Part Ten

COYOTES
Dir - Colin Minihan
Overall: MEH

 

Loud, stupid, obnoxious, and predictable, the self-explanatory horror comedy Coyotes is the latest from director Colin Minihan.  Written by the team of Nick Simon and Daniel Meersand, (along with Tad Daggerhart), this is bog standard nature horror/home invasion stuff with constant psyche-outs and computer generated canines that come out of the woodwork all aggressive like after a massive LA storm and power outage.  Things write themselves from there, with some stylistic touches like comic book freeze frames to introduce every character's name and flashy camera moves livening up a plot that is as hackneyed as they come.  Like most contemporary horror comedies, it also mangles its tone, with humans and pets getting brutally murdered, and characters uncontrollably sobbing over the harrowing ordeal that they are facing, all while quirky mannerisms are played for nyucks nyucks and people get annoyed with each other.  The comedy falls flat in almost every instance, plus the internal plight that real life couple Justin Long and Kate Bosworth face with their stereotypically smart-assed and moody daughter Mila Harris is never convincing, such dramatic moments feeling unearned.  On the plus side, Long is thankfully not playing his usual snarky douchebag, reminding people that he can do emotional, (if narratively forced), lifting when called for.

 

FRANKENSTEIN
Dir - Guillermo del Toro
Overall: MEH

 

It is a shame that Guillermo del Toro did not get to make his life-long passion project until this far into his career, as the resulting Frankenstein comes off like it cost a zillion dollars and is the work of a man who has earned the status to make such a spectacle on such a grand scale.  Similar to Robert Egger's Nosferatu redux from the previous year, it is inherently boisterous and schlocky.  The Mexican filmmaker extraordinaire has long championed genre fiction and has optimized the type of romantic artist that sympathizes with "the monster", going on record as staring that James Whale's seminal 1931 Frankenstein is his favorite film due to his inert attraction to its central creature and the tragic elements of Mary Shelley's source material.  Yet through decades of rightfully lauded movie-making, del Toro has also positioned himself as someone who seemingly has no interest in doing anything tender, anything subdued, anything nuanced.  Instead and like Victor Frankenstein's creation itself, every frame of this film looks artificial.  The tone is so bombastic that it makes Kenneth Braughah's over-the-top version from thirty years ago seem like Stranger Than Paradise, but accepting such a rambunctious and sweeping aesthetic is necessary or else the viewer will set themself up for unrelenting annoyance throughout a whopping run time that nearly reaches three hours.  Does the script tweak enough and justify its existence after over a century of other sporadic Frankenstein adaptations?  Is del Toro skilled enough at his craft to make such abundance compelling?  Do we really need a Creature that growls like a werewolf and can push a massive sailing vessel that is trapped in Arctic ice?  Guillermo del Toro seems to be enjoying himself asking those questions while spending gallons of money in the process, so maybe that is enough.

 

DREAM EATER

Dir - Jay Drakulic/Mallory Drumm/Alex Lee Williams

Overall: WOOF

 

An exceptionally bad Canadian found footage movie from the filmmaking team of Jay Drakulic, Mallory Drumm, and Alex Lee Williams, (the latter two appearing as the leads), Dream Eater makes a consistent amount of mistakes, almost every one that it possible can as if it is doing so on purpose.  The problems are of a "Where to begin?" nature.  A laughable excuse for our characters to film everything, unnatural dialog, an unlikable protagonist couple who have no chemistry with each other, scary music and artificial sound cues everywhere, scenic establishing shots, (?!?), an insultingly hackneyed plot, logical gaps galore, a monotonous structure that makes the movie feel ten times longer than it is, one stylistic or narrative horror cliche after the other, (too many to mention), Drakulic providing abysmal narration during an Unsolved Mystery segment that seems as if he is trying to parody said program, and quasi-terrible performances from everyone on screen.  In other words, it spectacularly fails at what it sets out to achieve.  The fact that what it sets out to achieve is just being another low budget piece of lazy found footage nonsense to toss into the heaping pile of such films begs the question of why anyone should care, let alone grant it a viewing in the first place.  It is one of countless examples of people exploring a sub genre without any clue as to what, (rarely in this case), makes that genre work.  Instead, Drakulic, Drumm, and Williams just throw everything that they have seen done in other horror movies, (found footage or otherwise), and see if they can make something stick.  Sadly and annoyingly, nothing does.

2025 Horror Part Nine

CLOWN IN A CORNFIELD

Dir - Eli Craig

Overall: MEH

 

In typical modern day slasher movie fashion, Clown in a Cornfield goes out of its way to subvert enough tripe plot points and familiar beats to justify its existence, while at the same time adhering to most of those familiar beats to irk viewers that have long grown tired of this always problematic and always oversaturated sub-genre.  Getting perpetual goofball Eli Craig behind the lens for this adaptation of Adam Cesare's 2020 young adult novel of the same name is to the film's benefit since these movies never need to take themselves seriously, even if parodies of them are as common and formulaic as the straight-faced ones.  Still, it never works to have characters suffering through grounded emotional trauma and having their buddies brutally murdered in front of them while the quips keep flying out of their mouths, but this issue has plagued horror comedies for eons now, to the point where such tonal imbalances are inherent.  As always, slasher fans will enjoy the kills and the silliness, and there is plenty of both here where the good characters are likeable and the bad characters are obnoxious.  The plot serves as an even more idiotic variation, (which is saying something), of 2023's Thanksgiving from that other Eli director Eli Roth, but this one plays it too safe to matter.  It is competent, occasionally insulting, mildly amusing, and ultimately just another slasher comedy that the universe hardly needs.  Plus, can we finally agree that clowns are the laziest "scary" things to put in movies?  OK, maybe clowns AND creepy dolls.

 

GOOD BOY

Dir - Ben Leonberg

Overall: MEH

 

Considering the fact that canines have long been associated with having extrasensory perception, it is a marvel that it has taken so long for a supernatural horror film to come along that is exclusively from a dog's point of view.  Good Boy is the full-length indie debut from filmmaker Ben Leonberg who utilizes his own Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever Indy in the lead, a gimmick that mostly works because Indy is an endlessly charismatic and expressive pooch that will make any dog lover jump for joy over his delightful performance.  While the concept is exciting and enough good things cannot be said about its four-legged protagonist, it unfortunately does not warrant even the brisk seventy-three minute running time which begins to overstay its welcome after endless teases towards bumps in the night that stay ambiguous.  This would be fine if Leonberg's scare tactics were less conventionally handled.  He relies on manipulative spooky music, stock nightmare sequences, a tar-covered monster that comes and goes at arbitrary times, some jump scares, and a messy ending that fails to deliver on the minimal amount of story that was presented in the first place.  Plenty still works here as the presentation is refreshing enough to at least create the allusion that such tripe genre elements are more interesting than they are, but if one is to be fair, the film can only be applauded for its ingenious concept and not for the bulk of its execution.

 

STIGMATIZED PROPERTIES 2

Dir - Hideo Nakata

Overall: MEH

 

Director Hideo Nakata and screenwriter/comedian/paranormal expert Tanishi Matsubara follow up their 2020 supernatural real estate collaboration Stigmatized Properties with the apply-titled Stigmatized Properties 2, (Jiko Bukken: Zoku Kowai Madori, Stigmatized Properties: Possession).  It is a typically over ambitions sequel, with a near two-hour running time that goes through not just one, but four different haunted abodes.  This gives it an anthology feel even though we follow Japanese idol Shota Watanabe throughout, portraying a likeable and naive factory worker with aspirations of being a television personality who takes the gig as the new "Stigmatized Properties Guy".  There is little pronounced humor, plus Nakata's scare tactics rely on the now stock J-horror tropes that he helped popularize of long-haired, pale-faced ghosts lingering in the back of shots and occasionally making wide-mouthed scary faces at the camera.  Oddly, these would-be spooky moments are also few and far between, which is disappointing for anyone coming in with meager popcorn-munching expectations since it basically jumps from a different ghost scenario to the next while spending most of its time lingering on Watanabe's unassuming puppy dog nature.  The final act is the most touching and explores the tragic backstory of Watanabe's eventual love interest Miku Hatta, a character who matches our lead's docile sweetness.  It is a shame that nothing funny or creepy happens, (and that Matsubara's script drops some of the most predictable "twists" in recent times), rendering this as over-long and forgettable at best.

2025 Horror Part Eight

V/H/S/HALLOWEEN

Dir - Bryan M. Ferguson/Casper Kelly/Micheline Pitt-Norman/R.H. Norman/Alex Ross Perry/Paco Plaza/Anna Zlokovic

Overall: MEH

 

Another borderline terrible and now annual V/H/S installment drops around its appropriate holiday, V/H/S/Halloween delivering six segments that are linked by trick or treating, missing trick or treaters, more trick or treating, Halloween parties, more trick or treating again, haunted houses (plural), even more trick or treating, and a diet soft drink for some reason.  At this point, the only way to enjoy these films is to have a lobotomy beforehand, since they are shamelessly stupid and aggressively pummel the viewer with the type of horror movie schlock that makes people hate horror movies.  In other words, if you are annoyed by the same lazy tropes being made fun of for the billionth time, steer clear.  There are both expected, (Paco Plaza), and unexpected contributors, (Alex Ross Perry), joining the mayhem, but each vignette adheres to a bloody and tongue in cheek trajectory that never bothers to utilize the found footage gimmick in any plausible fashion.  None of this is new to the series though which has always been inconsistent at best, so at least one can say that the harebrained tone stays on track here.  Besides Casper Kelly's "Fun Size" which is the most egregiously insulting, the rest of the bits are just egregious.  Which in the case of this franchise is actually an improvement.

 

NIGHT OF THE REAPER

Dir - Brandon Christensen

Overall: MEH

 

In the tradition of needlessly convoluted 80s throwback slasher movies that abuse jump scares and feature one smart-ass "twist" after the other until they collapse upon each other, writer/director Brandon Christensen's latest Night of the Reaper is as mediocre as the lot of them.  It is dumb, but it thinks that it is smart, which is part of the fun for those who want to scratch the itch that such genre-adherence provides.  Set in the 1980s because having cell phones in any of the scenarios presented would have easily solved things, (also, nostalgia yo), it opens with a by-the-books babysitter murder where the masked killer possess superhuman agility, foresight, and is seventeen steps ahead of their prey, cutting to a later time where two different story lines eventually collide, both of which are directly linked to said opening kill scene.  The actors are given no choice but to play the material straight, and it is to the movie's advantage that there are no obnoxious caricatures here whose bloody demise we root for.  At the same time, the goofy plot gasps and multitudes of moments that do not pass the ice box test jive poorly with the emotional roller-coaster that our two leads go through.  The details and beats are all familiar to a fault, but the best thing that can be said about the whole affair is that it could have been much worse.

 

THE HOUSEHOLD

Dir - Luke Shaw

Overall: WOOF

 

An overly ambitious full-length debut, The Household from Austrailain filmmaker Luke Shaw is loaded with problems that undermine its acceptable yet barely explored premise of a clandestine cult, (Is there any other kind?), that has been able to kidnap, amputate, and sacrifice victims on the downlow for decades.  The first issue is the two-hour length which is padded with minutes upon minutes of Shaw and his girlfriend filming EVERYTHING even remotely pertaining to their latest documentary venture.  This puts it in the realm of vanity project, not just because the making of their true crime project is nowhere near as interesting as the subject which they are investigating, but also because they are poor actors who never once properly convey the type of panic that their characters should be in as their inquiries deepen.  As far as "stupid people acting stupid in horror movies" tropes go, this one is brimful of them, Shaw in particular portraying a moron who dismisses every disturbing encroachment on his personal life so that he can keep plowing forward with his little movie that could.  His dipshit protagonist also seems to possess supernatural foresight as well as multitudes of cameras since so many angles are covered every time that there is a scene change.  He even manages to cut between professionally shot talking head footage and dodgy handheld footage OF THAT footage for no reason whatsoever, all while near-persistent scary music manipulates the proceedings and detrimentally signifies any would-be frightening image on the horizon.

2025 Horror Part Seven

THE UGLY STEPSISTER
Dir - Emilie Blichfeldt
Overall: GOOD

 

A fairy tale reimagining with plenty of gore and set pieces that are not for the squeamish, Norwegian filmmaker Emilie Blichfeldt's full-length debut The Ugly Stepsister, (Den Stygge Stesøsteren), takes a brutal and purposely absurd look at how destitute wields monsters.  What better way to examine such a concept than to turn the "Cinderella" fable on its ass, switching the focus from the title character's struggle to that of one of her evil stepmother's daughter's.  Lea Myren goes through the ringer in such a role, starting out as the "ugly stepsister" to Thea Sofie Loch Næss' eventual princess, going through an outrageous ordeal that is not limited to barbaric cosmetic surgery, humiliating etiquette classes, and tapeworm swallowing.  By the time that the royal ball is taking place and the Prince is preordained to choose his bride, Myren has undergone a full transformation, not just from a humble and only slightly homely girl with few options to a conventionally stunning debutante, but also to a ruthless byproduct of traumatizing conditioning.  It is a film where even the winners are shown to have some unflattering muck on their resume, (plus the ick factor may be too much for most viewers to stomach), but it has a demented tone and admirable determination to slam home its beauty-obsessed themes.

 

WEAPONS
Dir - Zach Cregger
Overall: GOOD

 

For his follow up to the insulting and ridiculous Barbarian, (one of the worst genre films of 2022), writer/director Zach Cregger thankfully sharpens his focus, crafting something with plenty of absurdity and ambition yet inventive enough to make its desperate attributes work.  Weapons begins as a fairy tale, with a child narrating the premise before we kick into a slow structure that examines one character at a time.  This gives the audience an explanation for each WTF moment that transpires, resetting things so that every layer complements the last one until we get to a fittingly ramped-up conclusion that pushes the tonal tight-wire act as far as it can go.  The film is equal parts unsettling and humorous in this regard, miraculously so at the exact same time more often than not.  While this could be seen a Cregger exhibiting reckless enthusiasm where preposterous things are happening in unassuming suburbia, he is so consistent with this mood melding that one has no choice but to accept it on its own terms.  Performance wise, the heavy hitter cast do commendable work, even when things get jacked up to eleven and they have to participate in ludicrous behavior that, (once again), is as off-putting as it is funny.  Some of Cregger's scare tactics are cheap and idiotic, themes are only present if one stretches for them, and there are a few loose ends scattered about, but its melding of grounded characters, cinematic gimmickry, and strangeness is unique enough to champion.

 

DRACULA: A LOVE TALE

Dir - Luc Besson

Overall: GREAT

 

So many, (too many), Dracula adaptations have come down the pike since the dawn of cinema, but if we are going to have to sit through yet another one, at least it is given substantial tweaks by a filmmaker who admittingly does not like horror films and does not like Dracula.  Enter Lur Besson's Dracula: A Love Tale, easily the most inventive, over the top, divergent, and hilarious reinterpretation of Bram Stoker's well traveled novel in recent memory.  Besson was not inspired by the text so much as he was simply by the desire to work with the perpetually unsettling leading man Caleb Landry Jones again after their 2023 collaboration Dogman.  How they stumbled upon Dracula of all things is anyone's guess, but perhaps it is the quasi-indifference to the source material that wields such wonderful results.  The movie acts as a parody and homage to so many versions that have come before it, (Francis Ford Coppola's blockbuster being the most immediate), with Danny Elfman's typically bombastic score recalling just as many recognizable motifs.  Yet innumerable plot tweaks and details like a dance montage through various countries, a perfume that renders women irresistible to the arch blood-sucker's charm, and terrible CGI gargoyles with martial arts skills just scratch the surface of the ridiculous direction that Besson goes for here.  The production design is every bit as grandiose and the pacing every bit as frantic as Coppola's version, but the epic structure is refreshingly ambitious, bouncing between cartoony horror, to absurd melodrama, to tongue in cheek glee.  Jones may not make an ideal Vlad Țepeș on paper, but he is fantastic here, chewing the scenery with a sly bravado that oozes charisma in every one of his frames.  Christoph Waltz meets him just as well on such turf as the Van Helsing stand-in, and overall this represents the only acceptable avenue to go down when bringing something to the screen for the millionth time.

2025 Horror Part Six

HALLOW ROAD

Dir - Babak Anvari

Overall: MEH

 

Fueled by tremendous performances from an almost exclusively three person cast, (one of whom is only heard on the receiving end of cell phone calls), Hallow Road unfortunately leans into vague and ominous platitudes during an ambiguous third act.  It drops its otherworldly components late in the game, then seems to forget about them for a bit, then comes back to them in an unsatisfying fashion, dangling a pagan folklore carrot that creates a mess that the story cannot step out of.  Though the latest from British-Iranian filmmaker Babak Anvari fails to nail the ending in this regard, (almost a guarantee for horror movies, and also the case in his full-length debut Under the Shadows), there is still a lot to recommend here.  Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys could not be better as an already troubled couple who rush out of the house in the middle of a night after receiving a panicked phone call from their daughter, and their proceeding real time journey crystalizes the types of fears and frustrations that any parents face in letting their children loose into the scary world of adulthood.  With lesser thespians in these roles, this could have easily steamrolled into egregious melodrama, but Rhys, Pike, and the voice of Megan McDonnell as their spiraling daughter sell the traumatic scenario with such sincerity that it forgives the unfocused genre aspects later on.

 

FOUND FOOTAGE: THE MAKING OF THE PATTERSON PROJECT
Dir - Max Tzannes
Overall: MEH

 

The second full-length Found Footage: The Making of the Patterson Project from indie filmmaker Max Tzannes is one of several comedic horror mockumentaries that has its heart in the right place, lampooning its chosen drama with a steady amount of glee, inventiveness, and sincere performances, yet it does so in a format that is perpetually ill-suited to the material.  Most found footage movies suffer from this problem, particularly mockumentaries where unbelievable supernatural and/or murderous events are captured on screen, yet everything is edited together with conventional movie-making beats, on-screen titles, multiple angles covered, and scary music.  Thankfully that later, (and biggest), faux pas is omitted here as the footage is played without such incidental soundtrack enhancement, but the other problems are still present.  As a movie where people film people making a movie, the found footage framework is unnecessary since most of the humor stems simply from the hapless production which is riddled with increasingly absurd problems that are given an otherworldly kick.  That is enough to differentiate this, even if the "scary" bits are cliche-ridden and poorly realized.  The film has a lot on its plate, and Tzannes and his crew can be applauded for their ambitious attempt to capture the chaos of low-budget movie-making while poking fun at the horror genre's inherent silliness, but it only gets halfway there.

 

TOGETHER
Dir - Michael Shanks
Overall: MEH

 

At least one absurd genre movie drops every year, usually with some buzz surrounding it and also usually within the body horror camp, (see James Wan's Malignant and Coralie Fargeat's The Substance).  Therefor the full-length debut from writer/director Michael Shanks is 2025's entry into such ridiculousness.  Staring the real life married couple of Alison Brie and Dave Franco, Together is front to back implausible with a severe tonal shift in the third act, but its problems do not merely stem from the outrageous premise.  Brie and Franco are an early 40s pair of "partners" where the woman proposes to the man, the man has no drivers license or job, and they still miraculously manage to buy what can practically be called a mini-mansion in the woods.  In today's economy?  This may seem like nitpicking since how many times do we see characters in movies living well beyond the means that their professions or circumstances should at all dictate, but it only enhances an already unbelievable scenario here that goes into some half-baked occult nonsense that raises even more practicality questions that fight against the loose supernatural rules that are presented.  Shanks does not so much as ride a thin line of harrowing, traumatic body-morphing horror and all-out schlockly goofiness, he instead barrels into these things at a moment's notice, making it all come off as if two different filmmakers were trying to make two different movies depending on what scenes they were shooting.  On that note, maybe this it deliberate.  Partners collide, so why not the film itself?

2025 Horror Part Five

DESCENDANT

Dir - Peter Cilella

Overall: GOOD

 

Most of what transpires in writer/director Peter Cilella's full-length debut Descendant is well done, even as it weaves through topsy-turvy nightmare hallucination tropes that have been frequented many times before in genre cinema.  The film's strength primarily lays on the shoulders of its exceptional cast, especially its two leads in Ross Marquand and Sarah Bolger who play a level-headed and likeable young married couple that is expecting their first child.  All of the common anxiety that comes with impending parenthood weighs on their relationship even before the psychological turmoil/otherworldly element is introduced, but these anxieties become unmanageable once the story kicks into proper adverse gear.  Cilella's dialog is a mixed bag of naturalistic and noticeably scripted, but it along with the top-notch performances slam home the film's central theme of a man and woman dealing with cultural role expectations within a partnership, and how both feel dependent on each other despite their ever-mounting fears of responsibility.  As usual, it all goes back to childhood, and there are many moments where Marquand is forced to deal with the understandably traumatic suicide of his father, only in a Jacob's Ladder type way where reality is constantly questioned and terrifying metaphors become tangible.

 

28 YEARS LATER

Dir - Danny Boyle

Overall: MEH

 

The original creative team of director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland return with 28 Years Later, the third installment in their rage virus zombie apocalypse property.  Actually made twenty-three years after the initial film, (eh, close enough), the project lingered in development hell for nearly two decades, making its emergence now as something that fans may rejoice in but will make everyone else thankful that the early 2000s trend of seizure-inducing action scenes are, (at least on paper), behind us.  On top of the obnoxious high-octane action choreography, there are also odd zooms, noticeable and terrible CGI, spastic cutaways, and stock footage, but at least Garland's script manages to allow for some sensitive moments where things slow down.  This is when the film works best, particularly during a third act revelation that sees Jodie Comer and Alfie Williams' mother and son duo coming to terms with the concept that "everything must die" in a world that has long gone to hell with naked and now bulbous flesh-eaters overstaying their welcome.  Like most zombie films though, it offers little of necessity anywhere else, and the franchise's penchant for awful endings is as steadfast as ever, setting up the next installment with some smirking, blonde, kung fu flipping warriors in retro jogging suits.  They seem obnoxious already, so if that is where things are heading, hopefully they all die in the opening scene of the next movie and we can get back to whatever skull memorial Buddhist monk shit Ralph Fieness is up to.

 

THE OCCUPANT
Dir - Hugo Keijzer
Overall: MEH

 

What drives the narrative in Dutch filmmaker Hugo Keijzer's full-length debut The Occupant is a persistent and all-consuming ambition to beat the odds, specifically to cheat death.  As a sci-fi bit of survival horror, Ella Balinska's determined protagonist struggles with more than the mysterious rock that she finds in Northern Georgia, more than the unforgiving Eastern Europe winter wilderness that her plane crashes into, and more than the also mysterious man whom she converses with on a two-way radio that claims to be stranded in the same brutal landscape that she is in.  Balinska's most prominent adversary is acceptance over what she cannot change no matter how iron-clad her will is to change it.  This comes in the form of a close sibling who is dying of cancer back home, and we are given a combination of flashbacks and hallucinations throughout Balinska's ordeal to slam home the fact that every move she makes, her every insistence to never give up is driven by her inability to live in a world without her most cherished love one.  It is a strong theme to hinge an hour and forty-four minute movie on, but the otherworldly elements do not seem to belong there, coming off as insignificant compared to a relentless tension that is grounded in palpable tragedy.  This leaves the film nowhere to go with is genre angle besides indulging in ambiguous waters, but if that was all stripped away and it had its feet exclusively rooted to the ground, then it would pack a more complete punch.

2025 Horror Part Four

THE SURRENDER
Dir - Julia Max
Overall: MEH

 

A full-length debut from writer/director Julia Max that takes on some heady themes, The Surrender ultimately does as much correctly as it does incorrectly.  Perhaps that is an unfair way to surmise a work of art, but there are some questionable choices here that jive clumsily with others that seem well in-tuned to a tale about facing up to the perceptions of our loved ones that fuel everything from guilt to frustration and back again.  Various comedic beats are scattered throughout, often times right smack in the middle of harrowing ones, giving it a chaotic tone that forces the viewer to take the material less seriously than it otherwise lets on.  Also as a horror film, there are some startling, intense, and creepy moments, but there is also a near-consistent musical score that ruins our ability to vicariously live through the otherworldly suffrage of our characters who are thrust into one of the most hopelessly frightening scenarios that one can conjure.  Worse yet are some major logic-challenging nonsense that the story asks us to take at face value, with both Colby Minifie and Kate Burton's protagonists behaving in ways that they only would in order to wrap the movie up in an agreeable time frame.  It is a cliche to say that there is a better movie hiding in here somewhere, but maybe repeated viewings will reveal that Max was more in control of her agenda than it appears.

 

MARSHMALLOW

Dir - Daniel DelPurgatorio

Overall: WOOF

 

Occasionally, filmmakers hinge their bets on a third act rug pull, perhaps in an attempt to blow enough minds that viewers will forget and/or forgive the numerous egregious ingredients that proceeded it.  The full-length debut Marshmallow from director Daniel DelPurgatorio, (working with a script from Black Friday screenwriter Andy Greskoviak), certainly has a wallop of a twist, but the road to get there is paved with deplorable characters, implausible situations, insulting summer camp slasher cliches, and a disastrous presentation that seems as if it was edited together by aggressive apes.  We meet a shy kid who is bullied, (please stop doing this tripe nonsense in movies, for the love of fuck), other kids who do not talk the way actual kids talk, (again, stop doing this), camp counselors who seem like they were created by an A.I. program that was fed nothing but the The Burning and the Friday the 13th and the Sleepaway Camp franchises, seizure-inducing nightmare sequences cranked to a deafening volume, and then tonal issues for days.  When we finally get an explanation, (given to us in a conveniently expository dialog dump), it excuses some of the logical gaps while glossing over others, leaving us on a note that seems like it going for badassery yet is actually just as haphazard as everything else happening here.

 

BRING HER BACK
Dir - Danny Philippou/Michael Philippou
Overall: MEH

 

Exasperating the flaws of their debut Talk to Me while sticking with traumatized teenage protagonists, (as well as even more gratuitous gore that is deliberately not for the squeamish), the follow-up from Australian Youtubers-turned-filmmakers Danny and Michael Phillppou is a mess of a movie that collapses under the weight of its heady themes and murky occult-fueled world building.  The Phillppou brothers follow the correct procedure in Bring Her Back of dishing out increasingly disturbing and mysterious details that all allude to having an eventual payoff, which they indeed do.  The problem is that there are so many of these ideas that at least half of them seem unnecessary and inadvertently under-cooked.  This sets up a house of cards to collapse, where the audience will be taken out of the proceedings since the initial ambiguity is fragmented by a sloppy execution that has no hope of tying everything up.  The inherent terror of the unknown is a paramount motif that is often necessary in horror, but when such things are balanced with the type of all too real and harrowing events that are suffered by our small crop of characters here, it does not present a fantastical enough universe for inconclusive supernatural laws to be upheld.  Things are actually disturbing enough without the uncanny ingredients, since the film deals with how people cope with what cannot be coped with, all too often making a mess of things in the process.  If only it just stuck to that, it would be a still uncomfortable yet more unified triumph.

2025 Horror Part Three

PROJECT MKHEXE

Dir - Gerald Robert Waddell

Overall: WOOF

 

The biggest problem with horror mockumentaries is the ever-present and two-fold question that it raises, namely "Who compiled all of this troubling and otherworldly footage together in such a cinematically inclined fashion, and also, why?".  The ambitious full-length debut Project MKHEXE from Gerald Robert Waddell runs wild with this conundrum, and it does so for nearly two hours, which should be an illegal length for any found footage movie.  Characters getting psychologically engulfed by conspiracy theories is a premise that has been explored ad nauseam, but each familiar detail here is played-out with aggressive melodrama that cheapens the entire presentation.  When a young man's death is ruled a suicide, his brother decides to make a documentary about it, which allows for him to do ridiculous things like shove a camera in his grieving parent's faces while they sit down talking heads style to be interviewed, pushing them with accusations while he flies off at the handle about reasonable things like his parents having the audacity to send his now-diseased brother to a therapist at one point.  What is this, the 1950s?  He also interviews himself and a handful of his brother's friends before plausibility is officially jettisoned in the last act, which raises more verisimilitude-obliterating questions like "How did they get this footage and why was it filmed in the first place?".  Jump scares, volume swells, rapid-fire editing, a monotonous structure that makes you feel all hundred and fifty-three minutes, an unlikable dipshit protagonist, and a story that is never remotely frightening or interesting, it is unfortunately one grievous error after another.

 

ROSARIO

Dir - Felipe Vargas

Overall: WOOF

 

A prime example of what contemporary schlock horror looks like, Rosario is the full-length debut from director Felipe Vargas, and it is one that is overflowing with hackneyed style, plot points, and sentimentality.  Calling a movie out like this for how insultingly predictable and obnoxious it is may be viewed as cruel or at the very least insensitive, but it is difficult to get behind something that desperately takes itself so seriously while having a bombarding tone what will induce endless chuckles from the audience.  A continuous disconcerting musical score, continuous jump scares, continuous disgusting visuals, continuous disgusting sound effects, and continuous volume swells mix with an apartment setting that is so dilapidated and filthy that one has to accept the aesthetic choices on their own cartoonish merit as to not bail on the film ten minutes in.  While the look, sound, and tone is a jacked-up yuck-fest of embarrassing cliches, Alan Trezza's script comes off just as unfortunate since its subject matter deserves an actual respectable presentation.  In a time where immigration laws are as controversial as ever and discrimination towards those who are entering America for a better life is a major point of concern, having a genre movie try and balance these sincere themes while barrelling you with such loud, messy, and lazy goofiness is just unacceptable.

 

SINNERS
Dir - Ryan Coogler
Overall: GOOD

It is refreshing to see a filmmaker like Ryan Coogler swinging for the fences with a Jim Crow-era vampire film no less, but his latest Sinners is an overstuffed movie, bordering on a mess.  That said, it also has an earnestness that forgives the handful of glaring things that do not work about it.  The most glaring of these is the inclusion of vampires themselves.  Coogler takes an hour to get to the story's main location; a sawmill-turned-hootenanny that is purchased with stolen mob money from Michael B. Jordan's hard-assed, dual twin, ex-soldier protagonists.  Eventually, things go full From Dusk Till Dawn hold-off, but it seems more of an afterthought against a backdrop of permeating racism that seems inescapable in 1930s deep South.  Gradually meeting our crop of disenfranchised characters during a single day and night where at least the illusion of bliss and freedom is achieved away from the ever-imposing hammer of oppression is where the film shines.  Even when the blood-suckers show up though and Coogler has no choice but to uphold some of the schockier attributes of well-worn vampire tropes, he still offers up a significant tweak that ties into a world where joining a ravenous brethren of the undead almost sounds like a convincing trade-off as opposed to continuing to play in the brutal, discriminatory sandbox of the real world.  A surreal musical number for the books, impressive and long tracking shots, and stand-out performances from everyone on board, (save blues legend Buddy Guy, who sadly exhibits the acting chops of a man who has never been asked to deliver dialog in any of his eighty-eight years on this planet), all further give this a respectability that it deserves, even if it is bursting at the seems with ideas that would be better left explored without fighting for screen time with each other.

2024 Horror Part Twenty-Two

THE MOOR
Dir - Chris Cronin
Overall: MEH

 

Imperfect and problematically overlong, The Moor simultaneously boasts some refreshing moments while getting stuck in the muck, (or stuck in the peat as it were).  The first full-length from director Chris Cronin, it opens with a long take that serves as a flashback inciting incident and an unsettling one at that, then skipping ahead twenty years where the somber tone is locked into for the next two hours.  As the title would suggest, much of the narrative revolves around vast miles of moorland where a serial killer allegedly buried his victims, one of those victim's fathers gathering a small team to go and investigate all these years later.  There are supernatural elements gingerly introduced along the way before they become more prominent, and most of these moments are done in lingering, eerie stillness, never becoming terrifying yet certainly being intriguing enough.  Cronin occasionally taps into the tripe mannerisms, (jump scares are indulged in as much as they are avoided, plus we get one of those scenes where a psychic woman gets taken over by malevolent forces and contorts her body backwards while making wide-eyed/wide-mouthed screechy noises), and he switches to both POV and documentary footage which creates a jarring effect.  The performers all match the film's overall brooding agenda of grief and desperation, but it  falls short of properly utilizing its inherently creepy setting, indulging itself with ambition.

 

YOUR MONSTER

Dir - Caroline Lindy

Overall: MEH

 

Written and directed by actor-turned filmmaker Caroline Lindy, Your Monster is a conglomerate of backstage theater shenanigans, broadly painted douchebag narcissistic exes, and a Beauty and the Beast budding romance.  It is inventive as a breakup movie, fusing its desperate ingredients together with some refreshing dialog and a command performance from Melissa Barrera, but some of those ingredients seem like they need to simmer longer.  Allegedly, Lindy conceived of the project as a fantastical reworking of an actual breakup that she went through, one that bares similarities to that of Barrera's protagonist who gets dumped mid-cancer treatment by her playwright boyfriend Edmund Donovan whom she is still head-over-heels about and devastated for losing.  This is after she helped him write his latest work whose lead character is named after, based on, and was promised to her.  In other words, Donovan is a one-note asshole, too much of an asshole to get on board with in the context of the plot which needs him to keep one-upping his fuckhead behavior in order for Barrera to embrace her rage and fire back.  Some of these moments are delightful, as are many of the scenes between her and Tommy Dewey's Neanderthal-esque monster who have the most plausible report with each other, even if their relationship blossoms from traumatic and violate to romantic and nurturing in a fast enough manner to move things along.  Still, the ending fails to land and it navigates a tricky tonal balance admirably if not precisely.

 

SHELBY OAKS
Dir - Chris Stuckermann
Overall: MEH
 
The derivative full-length debut Shelby Oaks from Youtuber Chris Stuckermann is not a good film, which is not surprising considering that many would-be filmmakers would also drop the ball after launching the most successful Kickstarter campaign for such a project, getting the green light to make an honest to goodness "real" movie in a genre that many people tap into for their first go-round behind the lens.  Patronizing aside, Stuckermann's efforts here are professional looking and he takes a commendable swing at fusing found footage with conventional movie-making, be it of a detrimentally hackneyed variety.  There lies the problem in that every plot point, every stylistic nuance, every jump scare, and every freaky detail lacks inventiveness.  Worse yet, they collapse upon themselves in a melodramatic and confused mess that throws a hodgepodge of familiarity at the screen in hoping that something will stick in an ambiguously disturbing sense.  Obviously it does not work that way, and maybe some viewers can scold Stuckermann for knowing better considering his film critic profession, but pointing out the pluses and minuses in things and then making a thing yourself are two different expressive muscles to develop.  The film is an odd duck to be sure.  Plot holes are glaring, leading to performances and beats that fail to line up properly and come off as unconvincing at best, unintentionally funny at worst.  So with a faulty structure, basic storytelling language clumsily executed, and nothing new brought to the horror table, it merely has the aesthetic and ambition of something better than it is.

2024 Horror Part Twenty-One

GAZER

Dir - Ryan J. Sloan

Overall: GOOD

 

This singular psychological thriller was shot over two years and comes from the mind of filmmaker Ryan J. Sloan and co-screenwriter/lead actor Ariella Mastroianni, lingering in uncomfortable intimacy as it follows a troubled woman who finds herself in the middle of an even more troubling ordeal.  As the main protagonist, Mastroianni suffers from dyschronometria; a rare degenerative condition that makes it increasingly difficult for her to keep track of time, often zoning out for hours as her finances are in dire straits, her relationship with her daughter is non-existent, her stepmother who takes care of said daughter deliberately keeps her at a distance, and she is plagued by a combination of surreal and vague waking dreams from the night of her husband's suicide.  Naturally, this makes her ill-equipped to deal with an unfolding mystery surrounding a woman who proves to not be who she seems that offers her a job which she cannot refuse.  Sloan directly references David Cronenberg's Videodrome in one of Mastroianni's more bizarre nightmare revisits, cinematographer Matheus Bastos shoots everything in 16mm with a handheld camera, and the music by Steve Matthew Carter evokes a kind of urban eeriness that fits the bleak and often times antiquated New Jersey setting.  It may frustrated those who are lacking patience or are too uncomfortable with Mastroianni's damaged POV to exclusively sit with it for nearly two hours, but it thankfully rewards those who can hop onboard its stark and uncompromising agenda.

 

SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS

Dir - Stephen Quay/Timothy Quay

Overall: MEH

 

An adaptation of Bruno Schultz' 1937 novel of the same name, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass is the latest from the stop-motion sibling animation duo of Stephen and Timothy Quay.  Even more impenetrable than Wojciech Jerzy Has' 1973 version The Hourglass Sanatorium, the seventy-six minute films feels nine hours longer, which is fitting for a story that takes place in a dream dimension where time floats in and out in mysterious waves, melding the past, present, and future through a haze of one's own psyche.  Unfortunately, it also makes for a maddening watch, not just because the pacing is labored, but also because the source material itself is so challenging and deliberately arcane.  The Brothers Quay have no interest in unlocking its secrets, instead traveling inward even further with a combination of their patented disturbed and striking stop-motion and live action, little dialog, and murky cinematography that looks like a representation of someone's half remembered nightmare filtered through Vaseline on the lens.  This is a shame since all of the stylistic trappings are purposefully in place and many of them are spellbinding, but just as many are impossible to decipher, and this is only taking into account the athletic and not the non-narrative that offers up a slow, slow, SLOW cacophony of nebulous strangeness to endure.

 

LISA FRANKENSTEIN

Dir - Zelda Williams

Overall: MEH

 

The directorial debut from actor Zelda Williams and the latest from screenwriter Diablo Cody, Lisa Frankenstein is a charming-on-paper genre mash-up that needs to be both funny and clever to work, yet sadly is neither.  What the movie does have going for it is a sharp aesthetic with vibrant colors, some neutered Tim Burton eccentricities, and a lovable performance from Kathryn Newton, even if her character, (and everyone else's), is underwritten at best.  Cody's script has a lot on its plate.  It tries to balance traumatic loss with zombie, romance, high school, and coming of age motifs, but the Heathers-style black humor does not come together, and Newton's makeover from awkward and emotionally ravished square to arrogant and reckless goth babe comes without any proper build up or logical footing.  Cole Sprouce does his best Johnny Depp-as-Edward-Scissorhands impression as Newton's freshly revitalized corpse/slave/love interest, but he mostly just looks like a sad and constipated puppy as Newton's villainous transformation makes her less and less likeable.  The tone is deliberately goofy of course, but its implausibility would not be so much of a problem if it was not so slapdash, or if more of the jokes landed, or if every plot point did not feel rushed.  Williams and Cody's hearts are in the right place and their work bypasses some obnoxious tropes that it otherwise could have indulged in, but it still ends up being a clumsy mess.