Scary Movie (2026)

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Of all the various legacy sequels that are propping up the Hollywood economy right now, the overwhelming majority have very little reason to exist beyond desperately trying to milk the cow one last time before the entire industry is put out to pasture. The new Scary Movie, to its credit, is the one among them with the most justification to be made in the current moment. After all, the last time that one of these shallow parody films was released was nearly 15 years ago, and the last time that they really had anything to do with parodying horror movies was in 2006. Franchise originators Shawn and Marlon Wayans departed the franchise after Scary Movie 2, all the way back in 2001. In the interim, a half-dozen horror trends have come and gone, so there’s a whole lot of ground to cover. We’ve seen the rise and fall of torture porn in Hostel and the Saw franchise, the glut of mid-aughts remakes that saw (among other things) Jackie Earle Haley take a turn as Freddy Krueger, a resurgence of zombie movies, an abundance of horror legacy sequels like David Gordon Green’s Halloween films and the Radio Silence-produced Scream sequels, MCU-ified horror like The Conjuring, and, of course, the much-vaunted rise of “elevated” horror. For 2026, though, the Scary Movie franchise returns to what it does … well, not “best,” exactly, since—despite the decline in quality over the series’ repeated returns to the well—none of these movies are particularly great, but it’s back to what it does adequately. 

Scary Movie (2026) bases most of its “plot” around 5cream, although its opening sequence most closely parodies Scream VI and cribs the NYC subway scene from the later sequel as well. The opening features a cameo from Carmen Electra and sees Teyana Taylor reenacting the opening sequence of Scream VI, in which Samara Weaving was lured into an alley in New York City. Here, however, she summons a crew of burly men to assist her in kicking Ghostface’s ass. As part of the movie-within-the-movie series Horror Movie, Teyana’s would-be date/killer calls her directly after a couple of back-and-forth text exchanges, and they break the fourth wall by noting that an audible phone call provides better exposition for the presumed audience than on-screen text messages, citing that most people who would turn out for a Wayans Bros. movie “are probably illiterate.” It’s supposed to be self-aware mockery of the audience but it mostly belittles the filmmakers themselves, demonstrating just how little regard the script has for its audience. Make no mistake; I laughed myself silly during this movie (under the influence of an edible, admittedly), but there’s not a single joke in here that doesn’t wear out its welcome by belaboring the point. One of the best bits arrives near the end when Brenda (Regina Hall) pretends to have been shot so that she doesn’t have to go back into the killer’s house with Cindy (Anna Faris), and we see that she’s faked her injury with ketchup packets. It’s funny stuff, but then Brenda overexplains the joke, and it makes the whole thing less comic than if the film wasn’t (over)narrating itself. There’s a potential cut of Scary Movie that’s twenty minutes shorter, cuts several of the dead-on-arrival “comedy” bits, is less dialogue heavy, and would be twice as funny. 

It’s been some amount of time since the last time Ghostface showed up to harass Brenda, Cindy, Brenda’s closeted partner Ray (Shawn Wayans), and her brother Shorty (Marlon Wayans). In the intervening time, Cindy has had two daughters, Sara (Olivia Rose Keegan) and Tuesday, who essentially play the parts of Sam and Tara Carpenter from the recent Scream sequels — because Jenna Ortega also played Wednesday Addams, get it? Brenda has had two kids of her own, the Chad and Mindy equivalents Brad (Gregg Wayans, who is thirty-seven years old) and non-binary Dei (get it?). With the return of Ghostface and an attack on Tuesday, Sara returns home alongside her clearly-the-killer boyfriend “Jack” to find her mother, who now has Jamie Lee Curtis’s frazzled white hair from the aforementioned Green-helmed Halloween films. This leads to Cindy’s reunion with Brenda, who has turned into a Ma-like figure for the local high school kids, including Shorty, who is in his third decade of attempting to graduate. Ghostface comes back to town, stirs up some interpersonal conflict between Sara and her mother (whose insistence that the return of Ghostface is all about her drives her daughter insane), some people die in wacky ways, and the film frequently finds itself sidetracked into various shallow references to contemporary flash-in-the-pan pop culture. That’s all that these movies have ever been; when they manage to parody something that stood the test of time, like The Matrix, it’s more of an accident than it is an insight into cultural longevity (and, like, everyone was parodying The Matrix). 

Last year’s rebootquel of The Naked Gun proved that there is a place for parody films in the market. It was so much fun that it led me to rewatch the original and its sequels, and I’ve also long been a proponent of Top Secret! and recently rewatched both Hot Shots films. The thing about those ZAZ parodies is that the jokes are so layered and come so quickly that even if one of them lands with a resounding thud, the movie moves along quickly enough that you’re laughing again moments later. In Scary Movie, every bit is 1.5-4 times as long as it should be, which means that even the jokes that do land can wear out their welcome quickly, and when there’s a swing and a miss, one still has to sit there for an interminable amount of time before we move on to the next bit. The first real clunker is when Cindy tries to remind Sara of the good times from her childhood, which is illustrated by taking her to see a mall Santa who’s actually the Terrifier; it goes on just shy of forever and isn’t funny at all. Other particularly unfunny sequences include full recreations of non-horror pop culture as well. After the memorably surreal image of Ghostface taking the place of Catherine Keener across from Shorty as Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out, the film segues into Shorty’s Sunken Place, which he calls a k-hole before Ghostface corrects him that he’s in a K-Pop hole. This leads to a fully animated sequence that sees Shorty hooking up with the three leads of KPop Demon Hunters while spoofing the song “Golden” with a chorus that includes the refrain “Gonna be gonna be smokin’.” It’s peak “Remember this?” style parody, and although that film’s widespread success may mean that this “joke” makes sense in twenty years (we’ll see if the references to Smile and cameo from Kai Cenat do the same), there’s no amount of time that will pass for it to ever be funny. (That having been said, the choice to do a parody of the marketing campaign for Michael with “Tubi original” Jermaine, featuring Kenan Thompson as Jermaine Jackson, was something that I thoroughly enjoyed. But why is it here, in Scary Movie? That’s an orphaned SNL sketch if I’ve ever seen one.)

Ultimately, Scary Movie leaves one with too much time to linger on and ponder the bits that aren’t landing. I was one of a group of five who went to see this movie, and only two of us laughed enough for it to have been worth the price of admission (one of whom was me), one person seemed to enjoy parts of it, and two people utterly hated it. One of the haters was a surprise to me, given that this is a longtime friend with whom I’ve spent no small time over the years chatting about our fondness for the first two Scary Movie films; we recognize that they’re not very good, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a certain nostalgia for movies that were airing virtually every week on Comedy Central during our formative years. He was the person I expected to enjoy this the most, since its comedy is really no different from the earlier Wayans Brothers-produced films. He was actively miserable the entire time, and I think that if you’re trying to decide whether this is worth your time, this is worth considering. It’s exactly as good as Scary Movie and Scary Movie 2, and if you didn’t like those, you probably won’t like this. If you do have positive memories associated with those, it’s still a crapshoot whether or not the humor of this one will land. All I can say is that, if you’re going to see it, you should try to get as high as Shorty beforehand (and for legal reasons, I remind you all to toke responsibly).

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Disclosure Day (2026)

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I remember reading an interview with Steven Spielberg years ago in which he talked about how having children had changed his point of view as an artist. Specifically, he mentioned that Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a film that sees its protagonist abandon his family to go with the aliens, would have had a different ending if he had been a father when he made it, as this was a choice he couldn’t conceive of having a character make after he himself became a parent. There’s a lot to unpack there about the way that a person’s real life can impact their art. Roland Barthes’s delineation of the concept of the death of the author has largely been the North Star of my critical approach, but it’s also an imperfect guide.  The man who made 2005’s War of the Worlds is not the same man who made Close Encounters; as an auteur, Spielberg had changed too much in three decades, and his stamp on both is very different as a result. Close Encounters would not be a better movie if Richard Dreyfuss stayed behind with Teri Garr at the end. With even such a minor change, it wouldn’t even be the same film. Unfortunately, Disclosure Day is a weak effort that shows that Uncle Steven may be getting a little too out of touch. 

While WWIII threatens to break out in the background of the film, two people find themselves inexplicably and inextricably drawn to one another: Kansas City meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) and cybersecurity expert Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor). The former is a rootless tumbleweed, dragging boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell) from one metro market to another while trying to find her niche, citing that she’ll know where she’s supposed to be when she gets there. Kellner is a fugitive on the run from the sinister intelligence organization Wardex and its overseer Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) while receiving directions from Wardex defector Hugo (Colman Domingo) about how to stay ahead of Scanlon long enough to get the classified data that Kellner stole into his hands so they can reveal an earth-shattering truth to the masses. Kellner is accompanied by his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson), a former novitiate whose past connection to the church helps them briefly find shelter in the convent where she was raised under Sister Maura (Elizabeth Marvel). 

Spielberg will turn eighty at the end of this year, and I think that’s vital to understanding this film and its intentions, and where those intentions fail or otherwise fall short in this text from one of our most respected living directors. The marketing for this film almost seemed to promise a return to form for the man: government agents in pursuit of something inexplicable but perhaps wondrous, as in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial; the potential to find beautiful meaning in something beyond ourselves as in Close Encounters; the promise of something spectacular and never before seen as in Jurassic Park. And credit where credit is due: the man knows how to shoot some stunning images. There are several exquisitely choreographed car chases, a daredevil train stunt, and numerous impressive tracking shots that follow characters narrowly escaping apprehension. But those are all technical achievements, not emotional ones, and as such fail to be cinematic ones. This does not feel like the Spielberg classic that the advertising would have you believe that it is; this is Spielberg recursively making an Amblin-inspired JJ Abrams movie, right down to the unnecessarily complicated mystery box at the center. 

Screenwriter David Koepp has had some misfires over the years, but he’s also the man who wrote or co-wrote Death Becomes Her, Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man, Presence, and Black Bag. This script attempts to tackle the concept of faith and belief and what effect the proof of aliens may have on either; it’s not only terribly misguided while simultaneously being overwrought and undercooked, it’s also facile to the point of ridicule. Here, the dialogue is stilted and unnatural, if not downright corny. Josh O’Connor is an actor I’ve come to like quite a lot, and it’s unclear if his delivery of every line of dialogue as if he’s not sure what the next word he’s going to say will be is a result of an acting choice, an attempt to breathe some life into this flat screenplay, or a directorial mandate, but it’s not doing no favors for Koepp, Spielberg, or O’Connor. Margaret Fairchild is woefully undercharacterized, so that in one scene she’s almost messianically beneficent, then swinging into a broad tantrum about not wanting to become a religious figure, then weeping uncontrollably. It gives Blunt the opportunity to play a range of audition reel-ready emotional states, but they don’t flow into one another with any kind of plausibility or humanity. Domingo and Firth are probably my favorite out of the bunch. Domingo brings a beautiful empathy to most of the characters he plays, and Hugo is no different; his dialogue is some of the corniest, but it feels the most true when delivered by him. Firth rarely gets to play such one-dimensional villains, so it’s nice to see him do something different for once and menace someone, even if it doesn’t add up to much in the grand scheme of it all. 

What really makes Disclosure Day old-headed is its belief in humanity. That’s probably a very cynical way of looking at things, but it’s also the most honest one. If you don’t want to be spoiled, stop reading here. The “disclosure” of the title is the broadcasting of data that the U.S. government has, via proxy management of a private corporation, spent eight decades covered up evidence of extraterrestrial organic life, both in the form of corpses discovered in crashes and living beings kept imprisoned (and tortured) for years. This sudden revelation stops the entire world dead in its tracks, as every person with a cell phone or near a television watches with rapt attention as Kellner uploads classified video footage of the recovery of alien bodies, “interrogations” of living ETs, and so on. It’s implied that this is so universally life-changing that it brings mankind back from the brink of its final, extinction-level war. That’s a story that might have worked when Spielberg was a younger director, an optimism of an earlier age. All the protagonist has to do is get the truth out there, and the world will be saved! In 2026, it has the odor of neoliberal Boomerism—a West Wing-esque belief that we live in a world where the work of making societies as a whole empathetic again—is as simple and clean as making everyone watch videos of atrocities. Everyone already does that, every single day. It’s not helping! 

Most of the atrocities that Wardex have committed aren’t shown to us directly. We see the beginnings of videos, and then we watch the characters within the movie react to them with alarm, disgust, fear, and distress. We hear more than we see. But some of the images that the audience does get to witness are eerily familiar, especially as the aliens in most of the videos appear to be very small, like children. In the Roswell video that we see part of, we watch as government officials pick up their tiny, frail, broken bodies with shovels; they’re piled into body bags together en masse, evoking the imagery of mass graves. It’s distressing, yes, but it’s also virtually identical to the images of the broken bodies of children in Gaza, Darfur, and Uvalde, images that people see and then scroll past immediately, ignored background radiation of modern living. Large portions of the West have been brainwashed into not caring about these kids because they don’t have the same skin color as the observer, and the idea that showing childlike beings of a different planetary origin undergoing mistreatment would somehow bring everyone together is patently false. It’s only sweet, hopeful, and optimistic if you are completely out of touch with reality. I’m all for optimistic media, but when it’s this tone deaf, it comes off as irredeemably ignorant. 

This is a clumsy, clumsy movie. Technical proficiency does not in and of itself an excellent film make. Pair it with a flimsy, trite, facile look at religion, add in a purely Amerocentric view (what, has every UFO only ever landed in the U.S.?), and have actors of vastly different calibers deliver faux philosophical dialogue, and you’ve got the makings of a film that serves as a reminder that the cost of being the voice of a generation is that, if you allow yourself to be defined by your generation, eventually your art will stop having any real world relevance.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Blades of the Guardians: Wind Rises in the Desert (2026)

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There was a round of headlines earlier this month announcing that George Miller is looking to complete his ongoing Mad Max saga with a new TV show & movie, which is impressively ambitious for an 81-year-old filmmaker nearing the end of his career. To his credit, Miller’s advanced age didn’t affect his ability to deliver high-octane action spectacle in his last Mad Max chapter, Furiosa, which found the octogenarian still experimenting with new ways to wow his audience with comic book mythmaking in every brutal frame. Even so, it appears Warner Bros is reluctant to allow Miller another spin behind the wheel of the war rig, so it might be a while before we see what Furiosa and the gang are up to in the proposed final chapter (if we ever see it at all). In the meantime, Miller was on the top of my mind while watching a different over-the-top action spectacle from an aging auteur, 80-year-old Yuen Woo-Ping’s big budget comic book adaptation Blades of the Guardians: Wind Rises in the Desert. Yuen’s flying-swordsmen action epic recalls Miller’s work both in its CGI sandstorm surrealism and in its shockingly elaborate brutality for a man of Yuen’s age. His name may not be as readily familiar to American audiences as Miller’s, but rest assured you are already a fan of his work, and you owe it to yourself to see how far he’s still pushing his craft while major movie studios are still allowing him to do so.

As a director, Yuen Woo-Ping is most famous for making Jackie Chan a household name in 1978’s Drunken Master, half a century ago. However, he’s most revered by martial arts fans in the West for his work as the fight choreographer for 1990s & 2000s actioners as formidable as Kill Bill & The Matrix. He effectively brought authentic wuxia action to the America for the first time, notably choreographing the flying-swordsmen spectacle of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which still defines the wuxia genre for most Western audiences. So, even if you are not familiar with the comic-book source material for Blades of the Guardians, you likely have some expectation for what a top-of-his-game Yuen Woo-Ping can bring to big-screen fight choreo. He exceeds expectations by the end of the first fight, much like Miller wowing audiences with the late-in-the-game ferocity he brought to the nonstop chase scenes of Fury Road. Yuen’s camera gets inches away from the hand-to-hand street brawls that break out at the opening locale, then pull away to catch a top-down aerial view of the same ongoing action. A nameless goon is pantsed & humiliated mid-fight by our vagabond hero in that opening bout, recalling the anything-goes tonal shifts of Hong Kong’s action filmmaking heyday. Later, two assassins battle each other with flaming swords in an oil field setting worthy of a heavy metal album cover. Arrows fly all the way through horse riders’ skulls mid-gallop, throwing them lifeless to the ground. An epic one-on-one assassin battle is staged during a world-ending sandstorm of Fury Road proportions. Blades of the Guardians travels across the desert from one action set piece to another like a true big-budget blockbuster, far from the philosophical sparseness of King Hu-style wuxia titles like A Touch of Zen. It’s a big-canvas crowdpleaser designed to keep your heart rate up and your fist in the air, held there by a seasoned elder of its genre.

Wu Jing (Wolf Warrior) stars as a 1st Century transient bounty hunter who’s constantly dodging offers to settle down as a government official (training troops in sword fighting) or as a small-village family man (raising the adorable young child he’s seemingly adopted Grogu-style). His skills as the #2 fugitive of the empire are put to the test when he’s hired to transport the empire’s #1 fugitive—the enigmatic leader of The Flower Revolution—to safety at the opposite end of the desert. The revolutionary in his care does not help make this task easy in any way, both wearing a conspicuous cat mask that broadcasts his identity to all onlookers and being so feebly averse to conflict that he makes each fight harder just by hanging around. Meanwhile, every assassin in the game is eager to collect the bounty on the revolutionary’s head, and the protector’s unwanted road companions land him in larger crises of political intrigue that complicate the mission at every stop. Like most wuxia actioners, Blades of the Guardians is adapted from popular lit that presumes familiarity from its audience and only offers rapid-fire exposition dumps and character-intro title cards for narrative bearings. If you can let go of needing to know the political & historical alignment of every character beyond their obvious designations as “good” or “evil,” however, it’s follows a fairly familiar action blockbuster path, wherein a seemingly stoic warrior gradually warms up to his found family of traveling companions after initially taking on a mission for selfish personal gain. The rest is all communicated in the broad strokes of horseback battles, head-chopping sword fights, and unexpected whirlwind romance — each depicted with an incredible amount of elaborate detail and technical precision from a Hong Kong industry legend who doesn’t get the opportunities to flex his muscles nearly as often as he used to.

I don’t think it’s inappropriate to dwell so much on the long-spanning legacy Yuen Woo-Ping represents in the director’s chair. Blades of the Guardians very deliberately acts as a passing of the cultural torch from older generations of Chinese action blockbuster filmmakers to youthful up-and-comers. While Wu Jing might headline the film after two solid decades of onscreen martial arts spectacle, he has costars so young & fresh to the game that their cast listing on Wikipedia links to a K-pop boy band instead of their own designated page (namely, Dong Sicheng of NCT, among other boy banders in the cast). It’s a movie that goes out of its way to pay respect to the industry’s old-timers, though, including small roles for Jet Li & “Big Tony” Leung Ka-fai and a last-minute cameo from Yuen Woo-Ping himself. You just wouldn’t know that if you saw any of the film’s elaborately choreographed fight scenes out of context, since they each convey a relentless eagerness to wow the audience that’s usually associated with younger filmmakers who feel they have something to prove. The stylized fights of Blades of the Guardians are unmistakably aligned with Yuen Woo-Ping’s most iconic work (especially recalling The Matrix in its hand-to-hand closeups and Crouching Tiger in its fantastic swordfights), but I still found myself thinking of George Miller as he staged those fights across the vastness of the landscape’s whirling sands. The two old-timers share a demonstrated hunger & ferocity you wouldn’t typically expect from filmmakers’ their age, putting to shame all of the other auteurs of their generation who get generously graded on a curve for the sloppiness of their own “Late Style” missives.

-Brandon Ledet

Chinese Torture Chamber Stories

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Usually, when someone describes a movie as “torture porn,” they’re not being literal. The term is largely pejorative, wielded to shame & insult a crop of aughts-era horror thrillers that found pornographic satisfaction in torturing buxom young women under grimy fluorescent lights. The genre’s tone is decidedly unsexy, as it has been gradually understood as a subconscious expression of culture-wide discomfort with the US’s torturous interrogation tactics in the post-9/11 days of the War on Terror. It’s important, then, to distinguish 1994’s A Chinese Torture Chamber Story and its 1998 sequel as literal torture porn: overt attempts to titillate their audience through leering depictions of traditional Chinese torture techniques, repackaged into the sleek production values of 90s-era erotic thrillers. Unlike the accidental torture porn of the following decade, the Chinese Torture Chamber Stories are also very direct in their expression of horror with the governmental interrogation tactics of mainland China, voiced from the somewhat safe distance of British-ruled Hong Kong. So, while the cowardly Saw & Hostel hid their own queasy arousal with real-life torture victims of the American justice system under several layers of artificial, dramatic remove, A Chinese Torture Chamber I & II were bravely upfront about being simultaneously icked out & turned on by their own nation’s cruel & unusual tactics for beating “the truth” out of the accused.

The first Chinese Torture Chamber Story is structured like an especially crass episode of Law & Order, with a pair of accused adulterers standing trial under the duress of an arcane legal system. Before the 19th Century court, a poor chamber maid (Yvonne Yung) pleads for a panel of judges to believe that she did not sleep with her wealthy employer (Lawrence Ng) behind his wife’s back, nor did she conspire to kill her own husband (Tommy Wong) so that she could run away with said master in full adulterous sin. In flashbacks, we discover that she is telling the truth. In fact, she has been a victim all her life, from being effectively sold into sexual slavery as a potential concubine for her master, to being married off to a potentially violent husband as punishment for supposedly tempting said master, to being punished by a panel of judges for acts of adultery & murder she never actually committed. In the eyes of the law, however, she is guilty until proven innocent, so the audience is subjected to watching her get spanked, beaten, and lacerated in the present, between dramatic scenes proving her innocence in the past. This archaic interrogation might be interpreted as a political statement against the effectiveness of torture as a method of extracting a truthful confession out the accused, who mostly just wants the pain to stop, but in practice it’s played as an excuse to stage nonconsensual S&M acts for a disturbed, horny audience — starting with a bare-bottomed public spanking to set the tone.

What you might not gather from that plot recap is that A Chinese Torture Chamber Story is a largely goofy slapstick comedy. The husband our poor handmaiden is married off to is introduced as another punishment for her supposed adultery, because he’s known to have a comically oversized penis that would physically harm any woman who attempts intercourse with him. When his timid bride finds him to be a tender soul and lovingly jacks him off from behind in a show of good will, the scene is played as a ZAZ-style parody of the pottery wheel scene from Ghost, complete with an Easternized remix of “Unchained Melody.” Her master also gets into over-the-top sexual mishaps while traveling away from home, most notably in a sequence where he meets a married pair of wuxia warriors, who perform violently athletic acts of wizard sex while flying through the treetops the same way most wuxia movies stage their sword fights. Any tonal seriousness elsewhere is a result of the extremity in the gore, which simulates historically accurate torture tactics involving chopped legs, pulled fingernails, crushed breasts, castration, and ritualistic penetration. Even those gross-out gore gags can be oddly humorous despite their heinous cruelty, though, never more so than in the opening credits sequence, which deploys the stock Wilhelm Scream sound effect a good dozen times before we even get to the title card. The movie wants you to squirm in discomfort, to squirm even harder in arousal, and to have a good laugh at its cartoon antics, all at the same time. It’s an all-timer cinematic feat in cognitive dissonance.

The 1998 sequel A Chinese Torture Chamber Story II falls much more solidly in-line with what an audience would expect from literal torture porn of this sort. Again, we are bearing witness to the ritualistic torture of a young woman accused of adultery & murder (Yolinda Yam), but in this case, she is guilty of the crime. In flashback, we learn the ways that her murder of an empire official (Mark Ho-nam Cheng)—whose entire job appears to be ritualistic torture of political dissidents—is morally justified. We meet her in a peasant village where her fiancée is hoping to earn enough money to one day make their marriage official, which opens the young couple up to a dangerous love triangle with a traveling warrior they find impressive in skill & social stature. The warrior’s potential to cuckold every small-town yokel who admires him is initially treated as a source of erotic intrigue, playing out like a mildly naughty Skinemax thriller with sweaty bouts of marital copulation relieving the tension. That hero worship quickly sours, however, when the noble warrior gets his puppy-dog devotees jobs in the local torture chamber, where they are horrified by the violent acts he emotionlessly performs as if he’s filing paperwork. Once his cold, villainous soul is revealed to the audience, he is free to commit horrific acts of sexual violence against his new employee’s wives, plunging the audience into a tonal ice bath that couldn’t differ further from the goofball boner comedy of the first movie in the series. We’re happy to see him killed.

The second Chinese Torture Chamber Story is a lot less playfully zany then the first one, which makes it difficult to recommend even to most schlock genre nerds. It’s strictly for freaks only. Still, it’s got such a psychologically fucked up villain that’s it proves to be a compelling watch in its own grimy way. At the very least, it’s the movie of the pair that more convincingly delivers on the “torture” qualifier of the “torture porn” designation, which is meaningful in a genre where the “porn” can never go past softcore. As exceedingly violent as Category III Hong Kong sex thrillers can be, their onscreen sexual activity is relatively tame compared to the hardcore pornos of America’s golden age. Characters will connect at the pelvis in sexual bliss, but there is no visible thrusting in that lower hemisphere; they can only heave their chests to simulate sexual motion. The screen can be overloaded with boobs & butts, but penises are only represented in veiled silhouette, except in nonsexual scenarios where they are separated from the body in elaborately violent acts of castration. The most onscreen sexual activity you’ll find in the Chinese Torture Chamber Stories is when the sex is at its most violence, as in when a comically gigantic penis literally explodes in a geyser of blood or when a character mimes forced fellatio on a magically invisible man. As literal torture porn, these movies are decidedly in bad taste, but they are also gorgeously staged acts of bad taste with surprising jolts of juvenile humor frequently interrupting their act of extreme sadism. The same cannot be said for American torture porn of the early aughts, which is just as dull tonally as it is visually & artistically.

-Brandon Ledet

The Death of Robin Hood (2026)

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Q: What would it look like if Robert Eggers made a Robin Hood movie?
A: It would look a lot like The Death of Robin Hood, a new grim take on the titular folk hero, set on the windy moors of 13th Century England. Aesthetically, the film is near indistinguishable from the brutal battle sequences of Eggers’s own folk-tale adaptation The Northman, immersing its audience in the mud & blood of a distant, heartless past. Whereas The Northman gets sweetly romantic as it goes along, however, The Death of Robin Hood is determined to remain stubbornly bleak throughout — opening with epic, bone crunching battle scenes in its first act and then slowing down to a mournful crawl of self-reflection for the remainder of the runtime. A bearded, grizzled Hugh Jackman stars as the titular Robin Hood, presented to the audience as an aging thief with countless enemies eager to slit his throat for past crimes. He complains that he is tired of killing & looting every waking minute, but he still manages to sling a few arrows and crush a few skulls with his old friend Little John (Bill Skarsgård) before the toll of his final battles leaves him infirmed and under the care of a kinder, gentler soul who pities his decrepit state (Jodie Comer, costumed in a Maya Hawke wig). There’s an intriguing genre exercise buried somewhere in that premise, once you dig past the familiarity of seeing Jackman give a beloved hero the same tired & broken-bodied sendoff that he once gave Wolverine in Logan (complete with adopting a young, dangerous protégé in his final days). In effect, though, it mostly just amounts to plugging a few recognizable Robin Hood character traits into the Robert Eggers playbook, without much imagination involved.

Q: What would it mean if Robin Hood were a scoundrel instead of a hero?
A: The Death of Robin Hood never convincingly answers that one. The reason Jackson’s aging thief is so remorseful and so frequently attacked is that he has spent his life robbing & killing with no moral discernment, all for his own personal pleasure. Somehow, it’s explained to us, only the stories of the few instances when he happened to steal from the rich made it into the legends of his exploits, spreading fake news of his supposed heroics throughout the kingdom. Everyone who knows Robin Hood personally wants him dead, while everyone who’s only heard of him through literature regards him as a populist saint. Through that dissonance, the movie appears to be gesturing towards some abstract point about the selective, reductive nature of mythmaking, which boils down a morally complicated human life to a few convenient talking points. In doing so, however, it comes across as a conservative screed against leftist hero worship, aiming to condemn violent action against the oppressive powers that be simply because it is violent. The only thing most people know about Robin Hood—more of a literary figure that a historical one—is that he broke the law in order to redistribute wealth. By asking the audience to reconsider whether he was ever a hero in the first place, the movie acts as a kind of political demoralizer, warning against violent populist action that might topple the status quo because it will lead to debilitating, lifelong personal regret. Stranger yet, it barely bothers to be about Robin Hood at all, since its subject is only identifiable by his name and his weapon of choice. The resulting picture is conceptually murky at best and, at worst, conceptually vacuous.

Q: Is Michael Sarnoski still an up-and-coming director of note?
A: Those waters are murky too. Sarnoski’s feature debut Pig (a preposterous culinary thriller in which Nicolas Cage avenges the desolation of his family by cooking delicious meals) was a real stunner, but it was also five years and two projects ago. Since then, he has directed a so-so Quiet Place prequel and a so-so Robert Eggers knockoff, both of which are only commendable for their whole-hearted dedication to a quietly somber mood. There are more children murdered onscreen in the opening thirty minutes of The Death of Robin Hood than I have seen in the last thirty years of wide-release Hollywood pictures combined. When the film is violent, it is monstrously violent. Then, when the aspect ratio tightens for Robin Hood’s mournful final days thinking about all of the people he’s cheated & violated in his wretched life, Sarnoski is equally fervent about stewing in quiet melancholy. It feels wrong calling The Death of Robin Hood a comforting movie, but once you push past our bruised & broken antihero’s wicked deeds, the Medieval hospice care he receives is oddly pleasant & calming. Likewise, Lupita Nyong’o’s repeatedly stated desire to die made for an impressively morbid hero figure in A Quiet Place: Day One, despite the other ways that film felt like a paint-by-numbers creature feature. Sarnoski has yet to repeat the emotional & thematic clarity that made Pig such an unexpectedly exciting debut, but he’s at least held onto his gloomy worldview while scaling up to adaptations of bigger, broader IP. Reportedly, he’s currently developing an adaptation of Death Stranding for A24, cashing in on video games’ current Hollywood greenlighting spree. I hope it’ll be something special, but I’m starting to have my doubts.

-Brandon Ledet

Stolen Kingdom (2026)

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As much as I enjoyed the disorienting dream-logic set designs of Kane Parson’s buzzy “liminal horror” debut Backrooms, I did struggle to find its corporate-void setting especially scary or unsettling, and I have to question how much of that disconnect is generational. On its opening day, I left my beige-cubicled office job to watch Backrooms in a downtown shopping mall with clearance signs hanging over the front entrance, so it felt a little like having my average workday regurgitated back at me through a digi camcorder filter. Even long before COVID lockdowns and the subsequent recession left behind that hollowed-out corporate world, I’ve always had daily interactions with those kinds of unused or depopulated “liminal spaces,” left to rot after they outlast their intended function. They’re familiar to the point of being oddly comforting, since as an adult they offer a quiet, momentary getaway from the social chaos of city life and as a suburban teen they offered a private place to sneak alcohol and other consumable vices outside the supervision of grownups. For a younger generation who spent formative teen years in the era of “social distancing,” however, I can see how Liminal Spaces might represent a much more horrific aspect of modern life, as remnants of a dead, emptied world with nothing left to offer the poor souls inheriting it. Compare the differing generational relationships with Liminal Spaces in the Gen Z horror of Backrooms against the hopeful Millennial art projects of last year’s Secret Mall Apartment, for instance, and you’ll find two starkly distinct worldviews (one which sees them as the physical manifestation of a culture-wide nightmare and one which sees them as an opportunity to have flagrantly illegal fun with your friends).

Actually, you can save some time by just watching Stolen Kingdom instead, which combines both of those generational relationships with Liminal Spaces in one concise 75min picture. Stolen Kingdom presents itself as a documentary about the high-risk theft of a specific animatronic prop from a retired Disney World attraction — namely, Buzzy, from the “Cranium Command” exhibit of Epcot’s “Wonders of Life Pavilion.” Buzzy’s mysterious kidnapping offers this unassuming documentary a great dramatic hook, allowing it to dress up its talking-head interviews with an endless parade of theme park dorks in the conspiracy-thriller costuming of a true crime doc. In practice, though, Buzzy’s theft is only a small part of the story told here, which proves to be a much broader portrait of an urban exploration subculture that spans multiple generations of interaction with Liminal Spaces. As described by various talking heads (who almost all have been banned from entering Disney theme parks at one point in their lives), the transgressive act of breaking into off-limits areas of theme park attractions has changed drastically in meaning over the years. In the earliest instances of urban exploration at Disney World, teenagers under anonymous pseudonyms like “Hoot” & “Chief” would trespass backstage on dark rides to take up-close pictures of attractions usually kept distant from the public, both as a juvenile act of thrill-seeking vandalism and as a genuine appreciation of theme park artistry. Later, the urban exploration itself became the main attraction to these stunts, with YouTubers like Matt Swonsa making a modest career out of bragging on camera about their petty crimes in action, shifting the cultural focus from art to narcissism. By that time, most of what was being produced was about how eerie & spooky Disney’s abandoned attractions had become in corporate rot, all shot in crime-scene flashlight like a real-life version of Five Nights at Freddy’s.

Regardless of whether they find the craftsmanship of vintage Disney attractions cool or creepy, the majority of Stolen Kingdom‘s interviewees at least agree that there’s a great moral chasm between exploring them and looting them. As a closed-off subculture with isolated online fiefdoms, urban exploration has developed its own heroes & villains and internal debates over ethics & integrity. That’s where the theft of Buzzy comes in. The indisputable villain of this piece is former urban explorer Patrick Spikes, who was arrested for conspicuously stealing & selling off props from retired Disney attractions instead of merely documenting them for his YouTube followers. No one has ever proven that Spikes stole the missing animatronic from Epcot, but filmmaker Joshua Bailey does sit him down for a lengthy, self-incriminating interview here, where he comes across about as innocent as Robert Durst in The Jinx. As a cultural artifact, Buzzy is effectively valueless; it’s not like someone stole the Ursula animatronic from the still-active Little Mermaid dark ride. As a symbol of moral crisis within the urban exploration community, however, the missing robot means a lot to the world profiled in Stolen Kingdom, equipping the movie with a narrative engine it would be totally inert without. Personally, I most appreciate this documentary as an illustrative timeline of how young people’s relationships with Liminal Spaces has evolved over the past few decades, as well as a dirtbag counterpoint to the more earnest hopecore sentiments of Secret Mall Apartment. Regardless of our varied generational allegiances in the cultural meaning of Liminal Spaces, I also find it comforting to know that most people are still in agreement that personal profit is a repugnant motive for doing pretty much anything, while sharing art is a morally righteous one. The kids are still alright.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #267: What Dreams May Come (1998) & The Afterlife

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Welcome to Episode #267 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of films set in the afterlife, starting with the 1998 Robin Williams vehicle What Dreams May Come.

00:00 Welcome
03:48 The Furious (2026)
07:22 A History of Violence (2005)
15:57 Blood Knot (1995)
24:34 Prince

35:27 What Dreams May Come (1998)
59:45 A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
1:15:17 Defending Your Life (1991)
1:31:17 After Life (1998)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Ramekins: Ramekin II (2021)

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It was my friend Jeb who recommended we watch the horror comedy Ramekin on Tubi, which he had been reading about recently. He noted that it was a no-budget movie, and that despite this, most of the reviews were positive, although almost all of them mentioned that the viewer had issues with the sound. I ended up loving Ramekin, with my only quibble, as noted in my review, being that I felt that the “all just a dream” ending was an unfortunate addition given that the film had been so strong up to that point. Little did I imagine that this would be far from the last time that these nitpicks would be relevant to this film series. 

Ramekins: Ramekin II opens with our lead from last time, Emily (Jamie Saunders), living in her late grandmother’s apartment with her elderly great-uncle Jared (Bill Weeden). She gets an unexpected phone call from a director named Cody (Cody Clarke, who is the actual director of the film), who saw her headshot in a casting magazine and claims that the idea for his next low-budget movie came to him all at once when he locked eyes with her photograph. That movie is, of course, the original Ramekin. I’m not sure what I was expecting from Ramekins: Ramekin II (Cody reminds us that it’s important to remember the subtitle in the actual text of the film itself), but I certainly didn’t expect the series to go full-on Wes Craven’s New Nightmare straight out of the gate in the first sequel. Emily gets her friend Mark (Chaim Samuels) to audition for the role of Mark, but Cody eventually decides to play the character himself, much to the annoyance of his girlfriend and collaborator Chloe (Chloe Pelletier). Emily’s best frenemy Jane (Piper Verbrick) also auditions for Jane, and gets the part, whose flirtatious relationship with Cody and clear desire to be recast in the lead role gets under Emily’s skin. 

The initial plan is to shoot in Emily and Uncle Jared’s apartment, and Jared uses this opportunity to go on a little vacation, but not before showing Emily that they do, in fact, have a ramekin, just like the one in the script. Cody drops off a box of identical ramekins at the apartment the day before filming is to begin, and when Emily gets up the next morning, she finds that the ramekins have arranged themselves in a way that indicates that whatever malicious entity haunts (or is) the ramekin has spread to the others. Emily’s fainting spell at this revelation leaves the film crew in the hallway for much of the morning, which raises the ire of a Karen-y neighbor, and shooting is moved to Cody and Chloe’s apartment. It isn’t long before the newly evil ramekins start to drive Emily insane again, with murderous results. 

The filming of Ramekins is great stuff. Clarke directly addresses the ending of the first film by saying that people simply didn’t get it, and that when Emily is “taken out” by the ramekin at the end of the film and “wakes up,” it’s not meant to mean that Emily dreamed the whole thing. I missed this detail, but the grandmother who is mentioned by name in the “you were there, and you were there” ending has a different name than the grandmother within the “alternate reality” that Emily has been ejected/taken out of. I don’t know if this is meant to be a joke about people’s reactions to the pat ending or if this is what Clarke actually intended in the original text, but it’s funny stuff, especially when Cody and Chloe talk about not using microphones for dialogue because it’s Cody’s artistic style to overdub everything in post. At the end of this explanation, Cody’s dialogue and his lips are clearly not even saying the same dialogue, and it’s a good bit, especially if you’re a fan of giallo films that used to do this exact thing. We get to see how the ramekin is made to move (with string, which is actually much more logical than my assumption that it was done with magnets), and certain scenes from the original play out in their entirety as the line between reality and fiction start to blur for Emily. 

The cast expansion is also a welcome update, as in addition to Chloe and Cody, we get to meet the effervescent Rachael (Molly Siskin), quiet cutie Jason (Mason Carter), and delightfully eccentric Troy (Jack Gordon). Rachael is given the least to do, but Troy is fantastic from beginning to end, as he’s the first to realize that there may be something happening with the ramekins when one of them goes missing. Rachael gets a fun comedic bit where, after first complaining that the impromptu green room smells like “big black garbage bags” (since Jane is dead and wrapped up in some underneath the bed), Emily puts the ramekin to her ear to convince her that there’s no such smell. Rachael immediately complies and grows more and more frustrated when others claim that the smell is lingering. Jason is perhaps the funniest, however, as he immediately notices the growing romance between Emily and Cody, which he wholeheartedly supports. When he takes on the role of Mark, Emily at first disbelieves that he’s ready to go off-book, but he admits that he has read the script over and over while in the bathroom, leading Emily to spout the ludicrous line that she “hopes they were number twos,” at which I cackled. When Cody and Emily finally confess their feelings for one another, Jason is first excited and then confused when Chloe calls Cody her boyfriend, as he always assumed they were brother and sister, since “Cody and Chloe are, you know, sibling names.” 

Ramekins: Ramekin II doesn’t have quite the same spirit of creepiness that the first one did, at least until the finale, where Uncle Jared returns and reveals that he’s known about the ramekin all along, and things get appropriately eerie. What it does traffic in is a very strong sense of comedic dialogue, which made this longer film pass even more effortlessly and breezily than the first. As of the time of this writing, it’s also available on Tubi, and well worth checking out. I’ll be patiently waiting for Ramekin in the Third Dimension.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Relic (2020)

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Relic was recommended to me by a dear friend, who texted that it felt “similar to how watching The Babadook for the first time with [me] felt.” I immediately put a hold on my local library’s DVD copy, and although it took me a while to get around to it, I can now report that this was an excellent recommendation. It’s indeed in the same vein of elevated metaphorical horror as The Babadook. In this case, dementia is represented as a haunted house, although the early stages of the haunting present very similarly to demonic possession, which also gives this 2020 picture the feeling of being a more sensitive, more expensively shot Taking of Deborah Logan. It excises Deborah Logan’s found footage elements and is instead shot more traditionally, which makes for a more sumptuous viewing experience and, one might argue, a better movie. 

Kay (Emily Mortimer) visits her family home in rural Australia, some distance from Melbourne, with daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) in tow. Kay’s mother, Edna (Robyn Nevin) has been missing for a few days, and Kay’s concern is compounded by the fact that the last time they saw one another, at Christmas, Edna was already starting to show advanced signs of dementia, including flooding the house with an overflowing bathtub. Although the house is locked from the outside, Kay and Sam fail to find evidence of Edna within. As they search the house, Sam discovers a closet upstairs with a newly installed lock, behind which is a moldy wall, which seems like evidence that Edna may be continuing to accidentally flood the place. In the evening, Sam is visited by Edna’s neighbor, a teenager with Downs Syndrome named Jamie (Chris Bunton), who tells her that he no longer visits Edna. Jamie’s father later reveals that this is because of an incident in which the two were playing hide and seek in the house, and Edna locked Jamie in the moldy closet and, despite the boy’s audible screams, forgot he was there. 

Edna suddenly reappears, dirtied and unaware that she has been missing. A doctor pays her a house call, and confirms that, other than a bruise on her chest that resembles the black mold in the house, Edna is of reasonable sound mind and body. Kay reveals to Sam that she plans to put Edna into assisted living, over Sam’s protests that either Edna could move in with Kay, or Sam could move in with Edna; Kay stresses that Edna needs the kind of care that her family can’t provide. Upon visiting a “retirement community” that promises enrichment and “ocean views” but is in actuality sad and impersonal, Kay reconsiders that course of action. Sam and Edna have some bonding time in Kay’s absence, which involves Edna giving her granddaughter an heirloom ring. Later, Edna’s personality changes completely, and she almost breaks Sam’s finger trying to reclaim the ring from her, accusing her of stealing it. Edna’s switches back and forth between her two different personalities become more frequent and unsettling, while Kay begins to have dreams about her great-grandfather, who died alone in a cabin that once stood on the same property and was undiscovered for so long that his body had begun to rot. The octagonal stained glass window, depicting an image of trees and mountains, was saved from that cabin before it was torn down and installed in Edna’s front door, and it features prominently in Kay’s nightmares as things get worse and worse. 

Relic is a film that, like mother!, is (to borrow a phrase from Lindsay Ellis) “Oops, all metaphor.” In the climax, Sam finds herself lost in a “Backrooms but an old house” liminal space behind the walls of the closet in which Edna earlier trapped Jamie. The black mold itself is hereditary dementia, something that can never be completely cleaned away and which is inevitably waiting for Kay down the road, and Sam in her time as well. The past, represented by the now long-demolished cabin and the window carried over from it, can never be completely destroyed. There are things in our genes and our DNA that we can never fully rid ourselves of, no matter how much we try to lock them in closets or nursing homes, and which we will forget, no matter how many post-it notes we write to ourselves or how many photo albums we try to protect. But that only has to be a horror show if we allow it to be. Whatever Edna is becoming is something that may not be able to be tamed with love, but which can be managed by it, and Kay’s haunted dreams are only a premonition of her own future lonely death if she creates that future herself by refusing to give and receive help (and love) when it’s available. It’s somewhat pat as a conclusion, but it must be by the very nature of existence as a story; it can’t possibly contend with all the variables that we’ll face in the real world or apply as a metaphor for people whose family structures are more dysfunctional and broken than this one is. But it’s also nevertheless rather sweet, and although the final images out of context might elicit horror, this is as happy an ending as can be expected, and I liked that about it. 

One of the things that I found most fascinating is the way that the liminal space in Edna’s house is used differently than the aforementioned Backrooms. When we discussed the film after we had both seen it, Brandon elaborated on what those spaces mean to Gen Z, how they represent a failure of the previous generation to build a world that had a future for them within it, or a future at all. The endlessly repeating “back area of a mall” location is an eldritch horror because it’s a representation of a space that has no place for them, a future filled with nothing but a vague and unknowable force endlessly replicating its own recreations of the past as its occupants toil in an infinite retail hellscape. In Relic, we see that same idea (albeit earlier) transposed to a home, one that’s too composed of the past, so full of boxes of old report cards, photographs, and dry-rotted seasonal decorations to do anyone any good. The sudden appearance of this space that Sam can’t escape, with the hallways and corridors beginning to loop back on themselves, genuinely changes our perception of what we’ve been watching so far, which has been a relatively down-to-earth parable about dementia and its similarities to the supposed hallmarks of demonic possession, into a movie that contains an evil crawlspace in which space is warped and time is bendable, representing the way that our minds can become spaces that we can no longer navigate or even comprehend. It’s a bold move, and I liked it. 

There are some who might find the “trauma is the monster” style of elevated horror played out and trite, and I understand that. As a movement within the horror genre, audiences went from flying high on quality, well-crafted, considered fare like Get Out and Hereditary in 2017 and 2018 respectively to an absolute into-the-gutter nosedive of artistic merit by 2022’s release of Smile. We’re still getting decent-to-great films in that subgenre, of course, but for every Weapons or Together, there’s a Him or a Lamb. Relic pulls it off, not least of all because this is an all-timer performance from Mortimer. I don’t normally think of her as an actress with his much gravitas or range; when she comes to mind, I mostly think “Careful, my bones!” or “Oh, yeah, she was in Scream 3.” She’s excellent here, and I’d offer major kudos to both of her co-leads. Nevin pulls off the transition from confused but kind to nasty and spiteful perfectly, and Heathcote is much more than just a pretty face. It’s stellar casting and performances all around. I’m not sure if this is streaming anywhere, but if you get the chance, it’s well worth checking out.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Across the Hall (2009)

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While wandering the horror aisle at my local video rental place with a friend, we stumbled upon Across the Hall purely as the result of browsing alphabetically. We love the late Brittany Murphy around here, and she looked gorgeous on the DVD cover, so we decided to give this one a shot. As it turns out, this 2009 feature was the last project of Murphy’s to be released before her death. Unfortunately, it’s not very good. First and foremost, it’s not a horror film. The distinction between horror and thriller is one that can be debated (as my friend and I did after watching this movie, even though we both agreed that it was mislabeled), but this is a pretty clear example of a late-stage erotic thriller, in which an unfaithful person and the character with whom they’ve been cheating both get an unhappy ending. I’m getting a little ahead of myself, but this film is also told in anachronic order, so we know that there’s going to be a body in the hotel room from the moment that the film starts rolling, as a character known only as The Porter (Brad Greenquist) examines the taped outline of where a body slowly bled out. 

June (Murphy) is engaged to Terry (Danny Pino), but we meet her as she checks into a formerly swanky hotel. Terry calls his best friend Julian (Mike Vogel) to tell him that June’s flight was cancelled and the airline called the house. Upon learning that she was no longer going out of town for business, Terry followed her and tracked her to the hotel where he presumes she’s meeting a lover. He also confesses that he stopped at Julian’s place first, and has the latter’s gun. Julian tries to calm Terry down, and promises to be there soon. At some point later, Julian enters a hotel room, where he finds Terry holding a bound and blindfolded man at gunpoint while an unknown body rapidly cools on the ground. Elsewhere in the hotel, Julian’s sometime flame Anna (Natalie Smyka) is trying desperately to ignore the strange behavior she saw Julian exhibit earlier in the evening. Of course, then we zoom around in time a bit and learn the truth, which anyone who has seen a movie before already assumed, which is that the man with whom June has been cheating on Terry is Julian. (If you watched this on a streaming service, you also probably already saw a thumbnail of June and Julian kissing, so nice going on that one, interface devs.) Most of the film then becomes about watching Julian as he tries to prevent the inevitable violence from occurring and—when it becomes too late to stop what’s been set in motion—attempt to extricate himself from the situation without additional death, revealing his affair with June to the dangerous Terry, or legal repercussions in her death. 

There were a few interesting directions in which this could have gone. Firstly, my friend and I were of the opinion that Terry was manipulating everything, that he had already caught June and Julian in the act and had merely arranged all of this in order to kill June and have Julian take the fall for it. The clues that hinted at this were the fact that Terry got Julian’s gun specifically to confront his fiance and her lover, and that Terry was utterly insistent that Terry come and meet him at the hotel. Ultimately, Julian does end up as the fall guy, but that wasn’t Terry’s plan from the beginning, it was just a scheme that he improvised when he realized Julian was the one cuckolding him. Frankly, the planted evidence of Terry calling Julian’s cell phone, which he finds in the bedsheets of Anna’s room, and leaving a voicemail that implicates Julian as the one who’s been behaving aberrantly is flimsy at best. There’s no way that Julian is going to be convicted while Terry walks away, consequence free, despite the slow motion ending where he disappears into the crowd on the street, invisible in a hastily acquired bellhop’s uniform. This is where the audience is supposed to have their “ah-ha!” moment and marvel at Terry’s apparent masterminding, but that’s not the story that’s been told up to this point. The film simply doesn’t come together into a cohesive whole. 

That’s not to say that the individual parts aren’t praiseworthy. Although the tone and editing undermine the ending, the film is systemically tight and well constructed, even if it’s apparent that this was a script that came together under pressure to be twisty and turny rather than to have convincing dialogue. There are several very convincing misdirects, with one of the most effective being that we watch Julian as he takes two separate baths; this doesn’t become clear until later in the film, when we realize that we saw him enter his apartment bathroom earlier in the timeline, take a bath in the hotel later in the timeline, then go into the hotel bathroom to start that second bath, chronologically between those two events but placed later. It’s good stuff, and for all the things that one could conceivably complain about here, getting to watch Mike Vogel strut around in naught but a towel several times isn’t one of them. It’s also worth noting that the film is visually sumptuous, gorgeous even. A decade and a half later, you could only hope that a bargain budgeted wannabe noir like this one would look a quarter as beautiful. I had a vision of what this would look like as a 2026 production while watching the film, and it was all white and beige boxes for hotel rooms, lit flatly, cleanly, and boringly. There used to be half a dozen movies like this every year — experiments in style that might not be perfect but would be mostly considered serviceable. Instead, you end up with something like How to Make a Killing, where the budget is out of control and everything looks like it was filmed in an AirBnB. 

Perhaps the greatest crime that Across the Hall commits is that it truly underutilizes Brittany Murphy. She spends half of her screentime as a corpse, and even if that weren’t macabre in light of her real life death being so close at hand, it would still be an utter waste of a talent. What little she is given to do is good. When she confesses to Julian that she’s been fooling around with him because she needed to know for sure that the love she felt for Terry was really her own and not merely a reflection of his unflinching love for her reflecting back at him, she really sells the sweetness and softness of that moment. It’s too bad that it’s locked up in this movie, an overall experience that’s really not worth writing home about.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond