Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992)

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What is there left to say about Buffy the Vampire Slayer? I got into the franchise after the TV series had ended, but only just, in a roundabout manner. In short, there was a demo for the video game adaptation of the show on a disc that came with the Official XBox Magazine, the subscription to which was bundled with the system when I got it for my fifteenth birthday. This led to obtaining the movie on VHS at a flea market within the following year and finding the DVDs of the first few seasons at the GameStop on Essen Lane shortly thereafter, starting a lifelong love for the slayer and her pals. I’m currently in the midst of a rewatch of the show right now, and even under great duress I could not calculate the number of rewatches I’ve had. Normally, people who enjoy the show don’t care much for the movie (or vice versa), but I love them both; I couldn’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve watched this film any more than I could tell you how many times I’ve watched the show.

We get a brief intro set in “Europe” in “The Dark Ages” that establishes the lore that vampires walk among us and that the only one with the strength and skill to face them is a girl called to be the Slayer, who is guided in her craft by the Watcher. We cross-cut from the medieval Slayer lifting an ornate stake into the air to a pom-pom held aloft by airheaded cheerleader Buffy (Swanson). We find ourselves in Southern California in “The Lite Ages,” where Buffy and her clique are a softer version of the Heathers, whose only concerns are shopping, dances, boyfriends, and curfews. After a chance encounter with a couple of broke mechanics named Benny (David Arquette) and Pike (Luke Perry), Buffy meets Merrick (Donald Sutherland), who introduces himself as her Watcher and tells her of her destiny, much to her “eww.” Elsewhere, sensing that the Slayer has come into her powers, the elder vampire Lothos (Rutger Hauer) arrives in Los Angeles with his flunky Amilyn (Paul Reubens) in tow to begin rebuilding his vampire coven. Amilyn attacks Pike and Benny one night; Pike is rescued by Merrick, but Benny isn’t so lucky, showing up at Pike’s place the following night floating around and attempting to convince Pike to join him, Salem’s Lot style. Meanwhile, Buffy is convinced to accompany Merrick to a graveyard when he knows details of her dreams, which he reveals to be memories of past Slayers. When a vampire emerges from the ground, her instincts kick in and she defeats it with ease. The two begin training, with Merrick warning her that she must keep her identity a secret from the vampires, and Buffy also strikes up an unlikely romance with Pike. Finally being challenged by a father figure while also finding something to love in a man she would have previously been too vapid to consider because of his working class background, Buffy grows as a person without losing the things that make her unique, and it may be just enough to give her the edge over Lothos despite so many previous Slayers dying at his hands. 

In writing about the film as a companion piece to All Cheerleaders Die, Brandon identified Buffy as “Clueless before Clueless, if Clueless were a Hammer Horror,” and that’s spot on. Buffy, like Cher after her, is the perfect 90s heroine: an archetypically ditzy girl with seemingly nothing going on upstairs whose apparent vapidity and cluelessness obscure a kind heart and a healthy intelligence that simply doesn’t present in a traditional, measurable way. When given the chance to see beyond the rim of the literal and metaphorical valley, they demonstrate a wealth of character. Buffy’s relationship with Merrick is quite charming, especially in contrast to the apathetic neglect that her parents demonstrate, and Pike serves as a nice contrast to Buffy’s boyfriend Jeffrey, who, instead of defending Buffy against a sexist remark from one of his friends when he asks to “borrow” her, declines on the grounds that he’d “get her dirty.” 

Although the film and the series are narratively aligned in the broad strokes (the events of the film are basically canon, with the one major change being that the film’s screenplay featured Buffy burning the gym down during her final fight, which was cut from the movie for budget reasons but treated as canonical in the show), they’re very different tonally. Buffy the series is funny, but it’s a supernatural drama first and foremost, with the comedy being an innate part of its charm but not what first comes to mind when one thinks about it. Buffy the film is a comedy from the ground up, starting with the gag that a Valley Girl with a name like “Buffy” might have a serious destiny, fated to slay the vampires that start to spring up all over Los Angeles. This gives the film the chance to tell jokes on several levels, from the lowbrow comedy Buffy cutting the hot dog that Benny uses as a phallus to mock her, to the more conceptual humor that arises from someone like Buffy having a special destiny, to the slapstick of Paul Reubens being staked and dying very, very slowly. One of my favorite jokes features the vapid teens trying to come up with a dance theme that’s socially aware, deciding on environmentalism but having trouble with landing it conceptually, coming up with the catchphrase “don’t tread on me” before realizing that you “kind of have to” tread on the earth. Later, the banner at the dance reads “Hug the World,” which is so comically meaningless that it’s hard not to snort. It’s good stuff all around. 

It’s hard to watch the film now knowing how mentally unwell Swanson has become in recent years, not to mention that a film that’s barely thirty years old has also lost so many members of its cast, with Perry and Hauer passing in 2019, Reubens in 2023, and Donald Sutherland in 2024. I don’t think that any of them were defined by their roles in this film, all having greater success elsewhere, but I still think of Sutherland’s role in this when I picture him in my mind, and I may be the only person on earth who thinks about Amilyn before Pee-Wee Herman when Reubens is mentioned. Nonetheless, that’s not what makes this movie an unintentional period piece, as this is a perfect little time capsule of the 1990s, a snapshot of a time when “Buffy, the vampire slayer” was a conceptual novelty and not a far-reaching media empire (this year’s failed reboot notwithstanding). The film is full of cameos from actors who would go on to have a much bigger cultural footprint: Stephen Root as the principal of Hemery High, Hilary Swank as the scheming Heather Duke to Buffy’s (sweet) Heather Chandler, and even a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance from babyfaced Ben Affleck as a member of a rival school’s basketball team. The best time to have seen this movie was when you were a kid or a teenager and you watched it three times a day for two weeks during summer vacation, but the second-best time to watch it is now.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Deathtrap (1982)

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In 1982, Ira Levin’s 1978 play Deathtrap was adapted into a film directed by Sidney Lumet, starring Michael Caine, Dyan Cannon, and Christopher Reeve. As the film opens, playwright Sidney Bruhl (Caine) watches in abject horror as his latest play is met with audience disgust and disinterest on its opening night. This is but the latest in a long line of flops for him, and he drowns his sorrows at the watering hole next door, where his friendly bartender tries to convince him that it can’t be all that bad before turning on the TV over the bar and tuning into multiple scathing reviews from critics. He calls his wife Myra (Cannon) to let her know he’s going to tie on a bender, and arrives home to the gorgeous converted windmill in which they reside the following morning, where he scolds her for smoking, as she is already under treatment for a heart condition. To add insult to injury, he complains to his wife that he has just received a manuscript from a former student he doesn’t even remember, soliciting feedback, and that the script for “Deathtrap” is perfect: five characters who will be easy to cast, a single set, and a hell of an ending. “It’s so good that even a talented director couldn’t ruin it,” he says, before latching on to the idea that he could lure the younger playwright to their secluded home, murder him, and steal his script.

Myra doesn’t believe that he’s serious about the idea, but when Cliff Anderson (Reeve) arrives to their cottage later that evening and divulges casually that the has no notes (or anyone waiting for him) at home and that the only two copies of Deathtrap are currently in the house, Sidney decides to go for it, and the two bury him in the vegetable patch. Before they can clean up, the two are visited by a celebrity psychic named Helga Ten Dorp (Irene Worth), who happens to be leasing a house from a neighbor in the lead up to her appearance on The Phil Donahue Show. Helga had a feeling that something dangerous was afoot, catching a few brief glimpses of danger and destruction that she can’t quite puzzle out, although their meaning is more clear to the Bruhls. After she leaves, the couple go to bed, only for Anderson to reappear at their doorstep in the middle of the night and clobber Sidney with a log, at which Myra drops dead from her heart failing. And that’s when things start to get really interesting. As the film’s tagline says, it’s not a whodunit, it’s a “who’ll-do-it.”

There are a lot of stage-to-screen adaptations that don’t understand that the transition between the two mediums requires a bit more massaging than just dropping the whole script into a word processor and changing the formatting a bit. Often, when the stagebound work is about the world of theater, the effect can arguably be worse as it draws attention to the fact that it hasn’t really been fully translated, just transferred. (A notable example: the change in Ulla’s dialogue from “Why Bloom go so far stage right?” to “Why Bloom go so far camera right?” seems like a meaningless and easy update between the stage and film productions of The Producers, but one joke works and the other doesn’t.) Deathtrap could very easily fall into this trap (no pun intended), but despite most of the film taking place entirely within the walls of the Bruhl home, it still feels like it extends beyond the limitations of that small set. When the events of the first act are being composed as a play later in the film and characters banter about what should happen next, the meta-textual nature of it could easily go so far up its own ass as to be annoying, but Levin is a very talented wordsmith and Lumet is a great director, so what ends up on screen is magical, alchemical even.

In its time, the film was dogged by a certain controversial element that I don’t want to reveal here, as it tips the hand of one of the movie’s many plot twists, and did so at the time for the contemporary audience as well. (Don’t even go to the film’s Wikipedia’s “Reception” section until you watch it.) I feel rather sorry for the people who were spoiled in 1982 and couldn’t go into this with completely fresh eyes, as I did. I watched this alone in a hotel room while traveling for work and gasped audibly at a few of the places that the narrative went, and laughed out loud at the witticisms of the characters (and the situations in which they find themselves) twice as often, and that’s not counting every time that Helga showed up to casually bump the board and all the players on it. Despite that, the film was well received by contemporary critics, although it appears that it was common to compare the film to Caine’s earlier picture Sleuth (a two-hander in which he plays the younger man having an affair with Laurence Olivier’s wife, with Caine and Olivier as the only actors in the entire thing), directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. The comparison is admittedly an easy one, but from our vantage in 2026, it’s easier to see the two as companion pieces. Deathtrap certainly works better in conversation with Mank’s picture than it does with Sleuth’s 2007 remake, despite the clever choice to move Caine into the Olivier role and cast Jude Law as the handsome young lover.

Deathtrap doesn’t seem to be available for streaming anywhere easily accessible at this time (other than ok.ru, where I’m sure the quality is not very good). I have the feeling it likely rotates on and off of Tubi from time to time, and it’s always worth checking to see if your local library has it on DVD. Just keep your ear to the ground so you know when it’s coming, but not so close that you learn too much about its shape. You’ll be glad you did.

-Mark “Boomer” Remdond

Primetime (2026)

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Robert Pattinson is on a roll this year. With his lead role in The Drama and a major supporting role in The Odyssey already under his belt, and with Dune: Part III still on the horizon, one of his most anticipated performances of the year was his portrayal of Chris Hansen, onetime host of Dateline specials entitled To Catch a Predator (contrary to the film’s depiction, it was never a self-contained, weekly series). Directed by Spermworld & Some Kind of Heaven helmer Lance Oppenheim, the film takes place during To Catch a Predator’s highest cultural saturation point, the mid-aughties, in the lead-up to the fateful day when Hansen and his crew’s participation in a botched arrest resulted in a man’s suicide.

(Please note: what follows is a summary of the narrative of the film, not a fully factual accounting of any real person’s history.) A decade after a trip to South Asia resulted in Hansen discovering the remains of countless children who had been trafficked from villages in the region, he finds himself haunted by this failure to save them. In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks and the resulting national hysteria, the “War on Terror” is in full swing abroad, personified in Stone Phillips reporting from Afghanistan, and at home, in the form of Hansen’s personal crusade to entrap and pillory child predators on national television, the town square stocks of the twenty-first century. Aspiring actor Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo), believing that he’s auditioning for Dateline’s reenactment segments with the sole intent of getting an official credit so he can join the Screen Actor’s Guild and get his union card, learns that he will actually be used as the “nubile” bait to lure sexual predators into Hansen’s carefully laid trap. Behind the scenes of To Catch a Predator, tensions are brewing between ratings-chasing producer Andie Bender (Merritt Wever) and slimy cyber-vigilante Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher), the founder of the Perverted Justice website that Hansen partnered with for To Catch a Predator. Also along for the wild ride is Del (musician Phoebe Bridgers), another decoy whose youthful androgyny allows her to play both young girls and boys.

On his very first day, Dan is traumatized when one of the predators (Jonathan Lipnicki) immediately exposes himself and puts whipped cream on his private parts before Hansen can enter the room. Andie, still distracted by running the show while Hansen confronts the man, half-heartedly congratulates Dan on his performance while also giving him some kind of medication for “migraines,” setting up one of the film’s primary themes: who is the real predator here? This has been a source of discussion online in the months leading up to the film’s release, as conservative reactionaries have painted “liberal Hollywood” as releasing a film intended to demonize a man that many see as a positive force (despite the lack of actual legal consequences for the majority of the predators caught). Although the events of Hansen’s life are remixed in order to make a point about the man’s questionable ethics (Hansen’s personal life falls apart when his wife, played by Anna Faris, learns of an affair, which did not happen until 2011, long after the 2006/7 time frame of the film, and conflates reporting Hansen did about sweatshops in India with one about sex trafficking in Cambodia), I’d argue that it creates a portrait that is more flattering to Hansen than most would believe. We get a clear, understandable demonstration of what the stakes are to him, and while the real-life Hansen has been quoted as saying that he sleeps well at night free of any guilt over his contribution to the suicide of Bill Conradt, Pattinson’s Hansen is clearly shaken, humanizing him in a way that the real-life Hansen’s own account does not.

He’s no hero, of course; there are none here. Despite telling Dan that the credit he should be getting for his role in the To Catch a Predator enterprise is “hero,” it’s clear from the very beginning that the people with boots on the ground are all in it for their own glory. Sure, Hansen has personified the evil of sexual predation into a cave-dwelling monster that he sees lurking in the bushes, but we get a clear picture that he sees himself as “Chris Hansen of NBC” before he sees himself as anything else, including a husband or a father; he even answers the phone for his wife with his full name and affiliation. He has no qualms about showing a rough cut of an episode to his very young sons, even waking them up in the middle of the night to play the tape for them, and his increasing excitement about getting To Catch a Predator into primetime and competing against ABC’s ratings juggernaut Lost shows that he’s more interested in chasing Nielsen numbers than perverts and pedophiles. That carries over to the rest of the crew, all of whom are given the opportunity to choose to do something more meaningful and positive with their lives but (other than Del, who walks away when she feels that the team has crossed a moral line) choose not to. Hansen meets a man on a plane (Creed Bratton) who expresses his admiration for what Hansen is doing and wishes that he could kill every person that Predator entraps, which Hansen finds off-putting, but there’s ultimately very little difference between that man and Van Erck, whose arguably positive intentions are overshadowed by his compulsions. Andie is given the chance to jump ship  to a different candid camera show that creates scenarios in which normal people can rise to the occasion and intervene when they see someone being harmed (What Would You Do?, with John Quiñones), and although she is tempted, she still decides to stay with Hansen and crew. The last we see of her, she’s staring at the blood splatter from a suicide painted on the interior of a house window and claiming that she can still find a way to make this into compelling television.

Ultimately, Dan does end up getting what he wants, his SAG card, but only after leaving the show. Hansen may be our main character here, but he’s static and unchanging, while Dan is the person who is more dynamic. The question of who is predatory and who is preyed upon comes through most clearly in his story, as he begins as an innocent who falls under Hansen’s control. The older man inarguably grooms him. He buys the seemingly underage Dan alcohol at the hotel bar, plays catch with him and compares the boy to his own children, gives the kid jewelry, allows his associate to give Dan drugs, and masterminds the metaphorical machinery that requires Dan to perform youthfulness, innocence, and hairless prepubescence. Each action has a purpose, of course, and doesn’t seem out of the ordinary in isolation, but that’s the point. Predation doesn’t always look like sending explicit messages online, and fearmongering about internet predators deflects attention away from the more common form of grooming, which is usually done in person and by someone that the victim knows and trusts. Prevention of both requires parental supervision, and Hansen’s representation as a largely absent and uninvolved father shows that his obsession with fighting a moral war (for everyone to see and praise) makes him exactly the kind of parent whose children fall victim to the evil that he’s supposedly opposing. 

Hansen’s war was largely unsuccessful, as we can see now living in the world he helped create. Fewer than half of the men who were lured by Hansen and team ever faced prosecution, since the evidence against them was inadmissible due to how much To Catch a Predator skirted the borders of legality. For all the hunts for a “whale” to take down, there was an actual gigantic cabal of elite pedophiles and pederasts active during that time period with massive paper trails, and there’s an argument to be made that making these predators seem pathetic, dim-witted enough to fall for the sting operations, and easily apprehendable contributed to the fact that members of that cabal were (and still are, within our government) operating with impunity. It certainly didn’t put an end to online predation, especially given that it’s moved from shadowy corners of the internet where unsuspecting youth could theoretically be lured into a kidnapping or assault to front-page misogyny that has rotted the hearts and souls of an entire generation of young men. The film doesn’t hold your hand as it traces that line, but it’s there.

Early reviews of the film were marked by praise for Pattinson’s performance, and he is quite strong here. He makes Hansen a human being, even if the portrait is of a man whose quest was in vain. The MVP here, however, is Wever, who does a lot with the comparatively little she’s given. If you’re looking for a scathing indictment of a man whose televised windmill tilting and desire to create a primetime pillory had little real world positives, you won’t find that here, nor will you find a flattering portrait of a reporter whose secondary goals were praiseworthy. You’re also not, as the reactionaries would like you to believe, going to see a story about how the abyss gazed back. This is about people who were given every opportunity to change course, whether it be stepping away from the keyboard and getting psychological help for their illness, backing away from the limelight to have a real relationship with their family, or finding a way to do their work in a way that didn’t cost them their soul, and chose not to. Grim stuff.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Chronovisor (2026)

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Chronovisor is one of my favorite films that I’ve seen all year, and also one that I will find myself reluctant to recommend to others. Similar to 2024’s Last Things, it is a kind of science fiction documentary, and although I was thoroughly enraptured by it, I must also acknowledge that it is a film in a challenging, novel format, and it will likely be a difficult sell for most audiences. The question of whether one will find it fascinating or banal will largely come down to how much you enjoy doing research. This is a roughly 100-minute feature in which the first eighty minutes involve watching someone else performing academic research and cross-referencing various texts and recordings before the final twenty minutes turn into a psychedelic sequence that is both dream and nightmare. If you have the patience for it, it’s quite an experience, but I also don’t expect that many viewers in the audience will be willing to go along for the entire ride.

Dr. Béatrice Courte (Anne Laure Sellier) is a professor at Columbia University whom we meet boring her colleagues over dinner with a long monologue about oratory rhetoric and mind palace techniques. It functions as a litmus test for the rest of the film. If you’re as disinterested as her dinner companions are, you’re not going to enjoy the rest of the movie, but if her extemporaneous lecture about historical memory techniques intrigues you, you’re going to be completely engaged. She returns home to her lonely apartment and resumes her ongoing research, which largely revolves around a parascientific device, the titular “chronovisor.” Allegedly invented by a group of scientists and clergyman, foremost among them a Benedictine monk named Pellegrino Ernetti, the chronovisor was a device that, by interpreting the “echoes” of events, allowed the user to view and even photograph history, including the day of Jesus of Nazareth’s crucifixion. Through reviewing videotapes of lectures, reading through dozens of historical texts in multiple languages (which are translated for us in the audience as textual overlays on the page), listening to cassettes of talks given by various pseudoscientific figureheads, and playing vinyl records of Gregorian chants collected by Ernetti, Beatrice uncovers a historical mystery, one with potentially unfathomable effects on our understanding of history, faith, and reality. Was the chronovisor real? What happened to it?

The camera’s eye alternates between providing an omniscient view of Béatrice as she goes about her research in various sumptuous, antiquated libraries (the press materials mention the German Society of Philadelphia, the NYC Yale Club, and the George Peabody Library at Johns Hopkins) and allowing us to see the documents and magazines that she peruses from her first-person point of view. This is the place where the film will either succeed or fail to engage the audience, as it effectively captures the feeling of doing research, which is something that I find delightful while understanding that my reaction represents a fairly small minority. Other than a couple of dinners that she attends with her fellow scholars that establish that she is isolated even within the academic world and a single scene in which she requests a long list of material from an unseen librarian, we don’t see her interact with others until she’s fully devoted to the pursuit of the truth about the chronovisor, as she concocts various narratives to spin over the phone with publishers, biographers, and distant relatives of Father Ernetti and his cohort. All the while, the text on screen that lays out the events of his life and research vacillates between factual translations of texts and hyper-edited remixes of the words therein into montages that read like flash poetry.

It’s compelling stuff, if the prospect of doing research into a paranormal device is exciting to you. As such, I would expect this film to land best with a viewer who enjoys variations on mystery narratives and who is already in tune with this kind of “ride along with the investigator” narrative, by which I mean that this is likely to find an audience among (patient) people with an interest in true crime. That may seem ironic, given that I myself am not a proponent of that genre generally, but it’s ultimately rather fitting, given that the chronovisor is real, or at least, it was a real hoax. Pellegrino Ernetti was a real Italian monk, one who really did generate and distribute a wealth of scholarship about Gregorian chants and other early ecclesiastic music, and he really did announce the invention of the chronovisor in the May 1972 issue of Domenica del Corriere (Italian for Sunday Courier). That article, “A Machine Has Been Invented That Photographs the Past,” was the catalyst for writing/directing/editing duo Jack Auen and Kevin Walker to dig into Father Ernetti’s claims, just as we witness Béatrice doing. Although the “evidence” provided for the chronovisor’s functionality was ultimately refuted; a widely distributed, supposed photo of Christ was found to be identical to a souvenir postcard of a Lorenzo Coullaut Valera sculpture in a remote Spanish church, and the alleged recreation of the lost Latin tragedy Thyestes was dismissed by a contemporary academic as betraying that its author had only a rudimentary understanding of the language. Chronovisor takes this real-life counter-evidence as proof of deliberate suppression, and builds a mystery around it.

Of course, you probably surmised from the breakdown in the opening paragraph above, Béatrice does eventually track down the location of the device. By this point in the narrative, we have learned that users of the device not only observed the events of the past but became psychically entangled with them, so we know that Béatrice’s discovery does not bode well for her. We once again bear witness to what she sees through her own perspective, as she engages with the machine and perceives history through a distorted lens that brings the “etch-a-sketch” visuals of the 1984 erotic thriller Blind Date to mind. This is the part of the film that I would expect to alienate the true crime audience, as it will speak more to fans of experimental filmmaking, and once you’ve met enough members of both those groups, you’ll understand that the overlap in the Venn diagram between them is small. That’s a great misfortune, as this is a very rewarding journey for those patient enough to allow the mystery to be doled out to them in this novel and inventive form.

As a visual effort, Chronovisor is gorgeous. It’s shot on 16mm, which gives a lot of text and depth to what we see on the screen, which is wise when many of the shots are almost indistinguishable from a still photo. Béatrice is portrayed not by a trained actor but by an actual academic. Sellier is a faculty member at the London Business School, NYU’s Stern Business School, the Columbia Business School, and a Cartier-Chaired Professor at the Paris School of Advanced Business Studies. That may not seem to be terribly aligned with Béatrice’s area of expertise, but she is currently researching creativity, cognitive biases, and human perception of time, and she carries that academic authority into the role, such as it is. Béatrice is, ultimately, little more than a cypher who decodes the mystery of the chronovisor for the audience to experience vicariously. What little we might surmise about her as a character other than her dedication to study is all interpretive (she wears a wedding ring despite no mention or appearance of a spouse, from which we can speculate a motivation on her part to see a deceased partner, but nothing more). This is not to the film’s detriment, however, any more than its insistence upon the use of antiquated technology is. If one were to forget or overlook the presence of recent car models on the street or a letter being dated (via typewriter!) February 2026, then the film feels like a period piece until the moment that Béatrice picks up her smartphone to start making calls. It makes for a bit of playfulness, which is welcome in a film that most people will complain feels like a group study project.

If I’ve managed to sell you on Chronovisor, the distributor’s website currently includes a “where to watch” drop-down at the bottom of the page so that you can check for screening dates near you.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Trouble with Harry (1955)

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I first saw The Trouble with Harry on a VHS that I bought from a video store on Essen Lane in Baton Rouge that was driven out of business by Blockbuster, around 2008. My roommate at the time hated the film when we watched it together, and I, at the height of my first Alfred Hitchcock phase, defended the film against his criticism. Upon rewatch, however, I must admit that he was right; this is not a good movie. 

That’s a shame, because it opens very promisingly. A young boy named Arnie (Jerry Mathers, aka Beaver Cleaver) is playing with a plastic toy ray gun on an autumnal Vermont hillside when he hears gunshots and drops to the ground. As he continues to explore, he comes upon the dead body of a man dressed in a gray suit. When he runs off to tell his mother, retired (alleged) naval captain Albert Wiles (Edmund Gwenn, of Miracle on 34th Street fame) emerges from the woods, where he has spent the day hunting for rabbits despite the land being posted. Upon discovery of the same body, he believes that he must have killed the man with a stray shot and resolves to bury the corpse to avoid arrest. His attempts to dispose of the evidence are continuously interrupted, however, first by the appearance of local spinster Miss Gravely (Mildren Natwick) who accepts his explanation and condones his course of action before inviting him to tea that afternoon, then by a wandering hobo who steals the dead man’s shoes, followed by the eccentric local doctor, Greenbow, who is so absorbed in his reading that he fails to notice the body even when he trips over it, and finally by Arnie and his mother, Jennifer (Shirley MacLaine), who identifies the body as that of Harry Worp, her estranged husband, before dragging her son off for lemonades.

All are residents of the small town of Highwater, which appears to have only about four other residents in total. Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe) is a gadabout artist with empty pockets, and although he has failed to sell even one of his paintings, local general store owner Mrs. Wiggs (Mildred Dunnock), a widow, finds his work beautiful, if incomprehensible. Her son, Clay (Royal Dano), is the sheriff’s deputy in the town, who supplements that position’s low income by repairing and reselling antique cars. After Sam and Clay have a brief interaction that demonstrates Sam’s lack of respect for law enforcement and Clay’s simple-minded nature, Sam goes to a scenic spot for some charcoal sketches, drawing the dead man’s feet sticking out from behind a bush without realizing what he’s espied. When he goes to inspect the man, he meets Captain Wiles, who tells him the whole story. From there, Harry’s body is buried, un-buried, interred, dug up, buried again, and then retrieved one final time over the course of a single day, as various parties realize that they may be the party actually responsible for his death.

Like Under Capricorn before it, this one barely qualifies as one of Hitch’s “thrillers,” if one categorizes it that way at all. There’s definitely a mystery, but this is a comedy first and foremost, and a screwball one at that, featuring character studies of the eccentric villagers of Highwater, Vermont. It’s odd that it feels so out of place, as the crew was full of longtime Hitchcock collaborators: composer Bernard Herrmann (nine films together), cinematographer Robert Burks (twelve collaborations, including several of the greats), costuming by Edith Head (eleven films together), and screenplay by John Michael Hayes (only four collaborations, but includes Rear Window). This should be running like a well-oiled machine, and several of the pieces do even if the total is less than the sum of its parts, with the standout positive being the visuals. In the special features for North by Northwest, one can find an advertisement for that film that features the director introducing it as if he were a travel agent selling the viewer on a cross-country trip from New York to Chicago to South Dakota; for all that it’s lacking, The Trouble With Harry could almost function perfectly well as an actual advertisement for Vermont during changing of the leaves. The scenery is so gorgeous and so well photographed that, before the film’s actual plot started to chug along, I was already earmarking this as a potential perennial favorite to watch every fall. What Douglas Sirk and Russell Metty did for New England winters in All That Heaven Allows, Hitchcock and Burks are doing for New England autumns in The Trouble with Harry.

Unfortunately, sumptuous scenery does not a great, or even good, film make. Things begin to tank the moment that Sam appears on screen; the wisecracks he rattles off are neither wise nor cracking, and I genuinely am unable to tell if Forsythe is making the acting choice to render Sam Marlow the most annoying character in the entire Hitchcock canon or if he’s simply trying to do the best he can with a bad script and failing. Unlike the audience, the other characters within the film are charmed by him, which is a baffling choice, although it may be chalked up to the fact that he’s the only man in Highwater who isn’t a child, elderly, or dead. He volunteers to guess Miss Gravely’s age and pegs her at fifty despite her only being forty-two, and not a single woman in this town bashes a cider jug over his head for his impertinence. MacLaine plays Jennifer Rogers like a woman blissed out on pills, which one could hardly blame her for if this were the case (her first husband died six weeks before she learned she was pregnant, and her single brother-in-law married her out of a sense of obligation before leaving her alone on their wedding night because of his horoscope), but she seems to just be like that, and it doesn’t make for exciting viewing. The dialogue for everyone is overwritten, which causes the so-called jokes to mostly land with a dull thud, although I did get a chuckle or two every once in a great while. As a result, although this one is only 100 minutes long, it drags along to its conclusion. The only character I really enjoyed was Mrs. Wiggins, whose half-mean jokes about her dead husband and her fascination with Sam’s (hideous, hideous) paintings give her a depth of character that the others struggle to achieve, as they fall back on cliches and eccentricities instead. 

The DVD I got from the library identifies this as part of the Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection Blu-Ray set, with the cover identifying it as an “Alfred Hitchcock Masterpiece.” I regret to inform you that this is a lie, and my college roommate was correct. A film that is only for Hitchcock completists or someone who is looking for a movie to put on, muted, in the background at a harvest festival after-party; don’t trouble yourself with it otherwise.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #274: Jamaica Inn (1939) & Hitchcock Blind Spots

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Welcome to Episode #274 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon & Boomer catch up on some personal Alfred Hitchcock blind spots, starting with his final British production, Jamaica Inn (1939).

00:00 Halloween Streaming Report
02:00 Dead Calm (1989) at Barrett’s Too
05:37 Hitchcock rankings
08:06 Jamaica Inn (1939)
30:20 Rebecca (1940)
51:11 The Wrong Man (1956)
1:15:34 North by Northwest (1959)
1:43:18 Hitch quiz

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

Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom (2026)

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In case you haven’t already met him, Shaun is a claymation sheep, one who’s too smart and too independent for his own good. Initially introduced as a side character in Aardman’s flagship Wallace & Gromit shorts, Shaun the Sheep has since gone on to become a name brand of his own, headlining an eponymous stop-motion TV show in which his mischievous schemes cause great episodic trouble for the farmer & dog that are supposed to be keeping him fenced in. The show is subverbal, with characters exclusively communicating in expressive grunts instead of using their words, which levels the intellectual playing field between the humans and farm animals in the cast. It’s a consistently, cozily delightful set-up for some classic silent comedy gags, and it’s proven to be popular enough to inspire a series of feature-film sequels outside the confines of television. 2015’s Shaun the Sheep Movie played as an action-spectacle escalation of the Shaun the Sheep TV show, dragging Shaun and his fellow barnyard animals off the farm and to The Big City in the George Miller tradition. Then, the series temporarily lost its way in its attempt at Atomic Age sci-fi pastiche in 2019’s Farmageddon, which disrupted the calming simplicity of its silent-comedy-farm-life premise by allowing a cutesy, hyperactive space alien to invade the scene, dragging the whole enterprise down to the low-attention-span antics of a Trolls sequel. Thankfully, while shifting genres to horror pastiche in the newest addition, the Shaun the Sheep franchise has retreated to the warmer tone and core character dynamics that separate Aardman Animations from the lesser, computer-animated DreamWorks of the world. Shaun is back causing covertly anthropomorphic mischief, the farmer gets into exponentially absurd mishaps through no fault of his own, and all the other people & animals hanging around have a sweetly silly time watching their hijinks ensue — this time while hanging Halloween decorations to help each other get into the seasonal mood.

The Beast of Mossy Bottom opens with the farmer and his animals waking at dawn with the creaky mobility of zombies rising from their graves. Once they’re alert and going about their separate days, both halves of the farm set about getting their Halloween plans in order; the farmer works on mustering up the courage to invite the local vet to his town’s annual Halloween Hoedown, while Shaun works on growing a secret pumpkin patch that would allow his fellow sheep to carve traditional jack-o-lanterns behind the farmer’s back. After a gruesome mishap massacres Shaun’s precious pumpkins in a blood-orgy of gourd guts, the determined sheep decides to play mad scientist and invent a growth serum that will rapidly develop new full-size pumpkins from seed in a couple days’ time, so they’ll be ready by Halloween. Only, his mad science experiment works too well, and the pumpkins never stop growing. Naturally, the serum is also mistaken for hair-growth gel by the balding farmer, who thinks he has a better shot at landing a Halloween Hoedown date if he can regrow the luscious locks of his youth. So, Shaun lives out the classic sci-fi horror plot of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein while the farmer finds himself in more of a Peanut Butter Solution rapid-hair-growth situation, of which it’s unclear whether the homage was at all intentional; it’s more important to know that his new hirsute look gets him mistaken for an errant sasquatch monster by freaked-out townsfolk. Certainly, there are blatant, unmistakable callbacks to more famous horror iconography elsewhere, including onscreen references to Psycho, Thriller, Dracula, Night of the Living Dead, and Friday the 13th. Those references are all likely to go over the heads of the children in the target audience, though, the same way that the first Shaun the Sheep movie got away with referencing Taxi Driver, The Terminator, and Silence of the Lambs without offending overly protective parents. It’s the kind of horror-movie-reference starter pack that can acclimate younger viewers to a lifelong genre fandom without immediately scaring them off with the macabre.

This latest Shaun the Sheep outing is Halloween-season kids’ fluff; it also might be the best movie in the series to date. The closest it gets to actively scaring children is in its climactic introduction of a kaiju-scale jack-o-lantern monster, but even that gag is quickly revealed to be all in good fun. Mostly, the scene-to-scene scares are character based, keeping the farm-life silent comedy of the series as simple as possible. For instance, when the town vet visits the farm, everyone is scared for entirely personal reasons: the farmer because he is scared of women, the animals because they’re scared of vaccinations. When the farmer’s Gromit-like hound is tasked to retrieve his missing, sasquatched owner, he visualizes the farmer’s scent as a ghost made of green vaporous stench. The Halloweeny quality of the picture is mostly due to seasonal decor. Jack-o-lanterns, rubber bats, mad-scientist lab equipment, and mysterious monster footprints decorate every set piece, while it’s continually clear that no one is in danger of suffering anything worse than a pratfall. The only real sour note is the film’s department-store pop music soundtrack, which has been a consistent earsore throughout this series. Only, this time the end credits play over a delightfully corny plot-summarizing rap song in Halloween goof-off tradition, so it’s difficult to get too angered up about it. Is The Beast of Mossy Bottom legitimately just as good as the first Shaun the Sheep movie or is its Spirit Halloween Store set decor just an especially pleasant backdrop for its old-school silent comedy gags? It’s difficult to say for sure, but The Beast of Mossy Bottom is unmistakably more successful as a Shaun the Sheep horror pastiche than Farmageddon was as the Shaun the Sheep take on alien-invasion sci-fi. It manages to naturally integrate the holiday into Shaun’s farm-disrupting antics without distracting from the show’s streamlined sitcom premise, and as a result it might incidentally inspire some future monster-movie fandom in impressionable youngsters along the way.

-Brandon Ledet

Halloween Streaming Report 2026

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Halloween is rapidly approaching, which means many cinephiles & genre nerds out there are currently planning to cram in as many scary movies as we can over the next month. In that spirit, here’s a horror movie recommendation for every day in October from the Swampflix crew. Each title was positively reviewed on the blog or podcast in the past year and is currently available on streaming. Hopefully this helps anyone looking to add some titles to their annual horror binge. Happy hauntings!

Oct 1: Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983)

“I’ve been toying around with creating a bit of an ’80s kid horror syllabus’ lately, which has involved a first-time watch or a rewatch of some of the mini-genre’s greatest hits: The Watcher in the Woods, Labyrinth, Return to Oz, Paperhouse, The Dark Crystal, and, regrettably, Transylvania 6-5000. I remember being somewhat less than impressed with Something Wicked upon first viewing, but this time around, I found myself utterly captivated by it.” Currently streaming on Disney+

Oct 2: Demon Pond (1979)

“A surprisingly romantic Japanese folk horror with a moody Moog score. Floats somewhere between The Wicker Man and Wizard of Oz for most of its runtime, then it’ll swerve into a special effects showcase sequence unlike anything you’ve seen anywhere else.” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel

Oct 3: The Doll (1962)

“A Swedish attempt to class up Psycho for the arthouse crowd that accidentally invents Peter Strickland’s whole deal in the process.” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 4: Ramekin (2018)

“If Julio Torres and Quentin Dupieux were to collaborate on a project (with no budget), this would probably be the result. The ramekin, like the tire in Rubber, is a menacing figure despite being a faceless, inanimate object, but its ordinariness is exactly what makes it so strange.” Currently streaming for free (with a library card) on Hoopla and (with ads) Tubi

Oct 5: Flesh Eating Mothers (1988)

“Descriptions across different film-oriented websites vary, but all manage to touch on the major plot elements: across a small suburb, a series of women are all having affairs with the town horndog, eventually contracting sexually transmitted cannibalism, which the kids in the town must then try to cure. What that undersells is that this ‘cannibalism’ is sentient, self-aware zombism in all but name, and also that the ‘kids’ are, politely, not very convincing as high schoolers.” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 5: I Married a Vampire (1987)

“You’re not going to get a lot of butts in seats for a movie in which a woman marries a vampire without titling that film I Married a Vampire, but that reveal would be a little more fun if you were able to go into a screening without that knowledge. Of course, the fact that marriage to a bloodsucker is the inevitable outcome of this story is made clear from the outset, when young Viola picks up her parents from the airport in an unnamed city; they’ve arrived in town after learning secondhand from Viola’s sister that she’s gotten married and are insistent on meeting her new husband. Of course, before she brings mom and dad home, she’s got to give them the whole story of how she met her undead husband …” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 6: Habit (1995)

“Oh no, did I get so drunk last night that I had risky public sex with that mysterious hipster vampire chick? Again?!?” Currently streaming on Shudder and for free (with ads) Tubi

Oct 7: El Vampiro (1957)

“An early Mexican vampire movie that bridges the gap between classic Universal Monster & Hammer Horror aesthetics. Doesn’t do anything you haven’t seen before, but it’s got an excellent sense of Halloween decor. It’s the kind of movie where every surface is veiled behind a thick layer of cobwebs regardless of whether someone’s “living” in the space. It’s a pure pleasure for anyone who enjoys hanging out on foggy sound stages with flapping rubber bats (i.e., cool people, sexy people).” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Pluto TV

Oct 8: The Vourdalak (2023)

“I know people in the industry are already struggling enough, but I really do believe all movies should be required to replace at least one human actor with a puppet, the more prominent the character the better.” Currently streaming on Shudder, for free (with a library card) on Kanopy & Hoopla, and (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 9: Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964)

“If the play and film Gaslight had never been produced, the psychological term that we take from it would instead be called ‘Sweet Charlotting’ or ‘Hush Hushing.'” Currently streaming for free (with a library card) on Hoopla

Oct 10: Relic (2020)

“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.” Currently streaming on Shudder and for free (with a library card) on Kanopy

Oct 11: Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972)

“Horror nerds have already thoroughly mined every last golden nugget of vintage Italo horror schlock, so all that’s left to pick through is their Spanish equivalents. For your giallo fix, you can look to The Corruption of Chris Miller, and for your next late-night zombi flick you can look here.” Currently streaming on Shudder

Oct 12: Maniac Cop (1988)

“Whereas Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive asks, ‘What if there was a baby who was an ugly, homicidal maniac?’, his script for Maniac Cop asks, ‘What if there was a cop who was an ugly, homicidal maniac?’ It’s a surprisingly effective venture since, as you know, all cops are ugly, homicidal maniacs, which makes its source of fear lastingly relatable.” Currently streaming on Shudder, on Amazon Prime, for free (with a library card) on Kanopy, and (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 13: Species (1995)

“Decent enough for a mid-budget/mid-90s creature feature, but much more fun as a novelty mutation of the era’s erotic thriller craze. The only bummer is that we didn’t get even more movies based on Giger designs, so that this would feel less like an Alien knockoff and more like a routine entry in a wet-nightmare Gigersploitation subgenre.” Currently streaming on MGM+, for free (with a library card) on Kanopy & Hoopla, and (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 14: The Host (2006)

“In 2006, this was undoubtedly seen a bold new monster movie, but it lacks the timelessness of some of Bong’s other works; or perhaps what I mean to say is that if you already know Bong as an auteur after seeing some of his other films, this one may be a letdown, but if you approach it as a straight monster movie, you’re more likely to be satisfied.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and for free (with a library card) on Kanopy & Hoopla

Oct 15: Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975)

“Ishirō Honda exits the Godzilla series on a serious note, keeping all of the space alien invaders and remote-controlled kaiju that had crept into routine formula over the years but deciding to play them straight instead of goofy. He even makes the recycling of previous films’ footage feel elegant, playing it back in a 4-way splitscreen layout. His sincerity makes for some surprisingly compelling drama, to the point where you forget he also directed a couple of Godzilla’s silliest, flimsiest outings (namely King Kong vs Godzilla and All Monsters Attack).” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, on HBO Max, and for free (with ads) on The Roku Channel

Oct 16: Gorgo (1961)

“The poster promises monster mayhem “LIKE NOTHING YOU’VE EVER SEEN BEFORE”, then the monster looks exactly like Godzilla (now with ears) and the opening credits shamelessly borrow the King Kong font. Really makes you think.” Currently streaming on Shudder, for free (with a library card) on Hoopla, and (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 17: Demonwarp (1988)

“A bugnuts alien invasion movie hiding in plain sight as a mediocre sasquatch movie.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and for free (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 18: Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988)

“Angela skips several rites of passage in the slasher villain evolutionary chain and goes straight into ‘Ain’t I a stinker?’ goofball mode.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and for free (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 19: Death Metal Zombies (1995)

“An SOV backyard metalsploitation relic that’s way more interested in quirky character comedy than it is in staging the expected gore gags. Wall to wall metal tunes playing over the goofiest line readings this side of Motern Media. In a word, adorable. Evangelical Christians who believe metalheads are devil worshipping, child murdering psychopaths should be forced to watch this so they can see the truth: they’re just dorks in black t-shirts.” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 20: Nekromantik (1988)

“A German geek show about a perverted couple who use a human corpse as a marital aid in bed. I don’t say this lightly, but the most shocking thing about it is how tender & sensual the ‘threesome’ sex is in practice, despite it also being, you know, unforgivably vile.” Currently streaming on Shudder

Oct 21: Phantom of the Opera (1925)

“Okay wow this really is a macabre masterpiece, to the point where no Best of All Time horror list is complete without it. It’s not just on those out of duty & obligation & kudos for Chaney’s makeup.” Currently streaming on Shudder, for free (with a library card) on Kanopy, and (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 22: The Mummy (1932)

“A harrowing reminder to never pilfer cultural artifacts for museum exhibits, never dismiss ancient curses as ‘mumbo jumbo’, and never forget to wear your sunscreen.” Currently streaming on Peacock

Oct 23: The Mummy (1999)

“A lot of the CGI here will look dated to the modern eye, even to those of us who remember this as being an extravaganza of realist effects. A lot of it still works because its uncanniness can be excused as a matter of course for a horror flick, but the CGI Thebes stands out as particularly video game-esque. The rewatch of this was prompted by the recent release of Lee Cronin’s Mummy, but the timing happened to align with Passover having recently happened, and I realized I had always thought of this as a kind of Passover movie, a secular alternative to The Ten Commandments that also happened to contain the plagues. (Toads and frogs are one of the ones that are left out, presumably because every amphibian wrangler in Hollywood was working on Magnolia at the time.)” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 24: 13 Ghosts (1960)

“Plays like William Castle’s backdoor pilot for a Munsters/Addams-style spooky TV sitcom.” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 25: The Invisible Man (1933)

“Sure, The Invisible Man is an unrepentant mass murderer, but he also mostly uses his invisibility powers to slap around and humiliate cops, so I don’t have it in my heart to condemn him. This quite possibly the greatest mad scientist film of all time, and if it’s not that’s only because James Whale already bested himself with Frankenstein.” Currently streaming on Peacock

Oct 26: Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

“Gorgeous picture. I wonder if James Cameron struggles with the knowledge that underwater 3D filmmaking was already perfected months (months!) before he was born.” Currently streaming on Peacock

Oct 27: Forbidden Planet (1957)

“Flying saucers, laser battles, psychic monsters, synthesizers, a cute robot, a mini-skirted alien babe, mid-century modern decor: the Platonic ideal of Atomic Age sci-fi.” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 28: The Toxic Avenger II (1989)

“Much more wholesome than the Toxic Avenger’s first outing. It’s mostly a Troma travelogue, with Toxie reporting on his Tokyo vacation with the same childlike cadence as Big Bird traveling on assignment.” Currently streaming on Shudder, on Amazon Prime, for free (with a library card) on Kanopy, and (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 29: Brain Damage (1988)

“Incredibly funny to discover the monster sounds like That after so many years of only seeing him in still images. It’s the kind of vocal performance you’d expect in a Rankin Bass cartoon and not the sleaziest horror comedy to ever disgrace the streets of NYC.” Currently streaming for free (with a library card) on Kanopy

Oct 30: Evil Dead II (1987)

“Only a fool would wait decades for a Hollywood studio to remake their calling card indie film with bigger, slicker production values. Best to scrape the money together to do it yourself before anyone else gets to it.” Currently streaming on HBO Max and for free (with a library card) on Kanopy

Oct 31: Orgy of the Dead (1965)

“I found this punishingly boring as a college-era VHS rental, outside a few Criswell line readings that we would quote from time to time. Now that I’m 40, there’s nothing I’d rather be doing than watching an endless nudie cutie striptease on an ooky-spooky graveyard set. Glad to know I’ve matured over the years.” Currently streaming on Mubi

-The Swampflix Crew

Hope (2026)

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Hope is the latest film from The Wailing director Na Hong-jin. Early reactions were fairly mixed, and now having seen the film myself, I can understand why. For much of its run, Hope is an exciting action thriller, with thrilling chase scenes, suspenseful sequences, and quiet moments of humanity. All of this works quite well, especially when we see less of the monster(s) that are running around and causing trouble, but once we do see them, it takes a downhill turn before ending on a truly bizarre note, one that comes after a film that’s a little too long for its own good.

Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) is the police chief of Hope Harbor, a South Korean village that abuts the Demilitarized Zone, the population of which is made up largely of elderly people and supermodel-hot younger folks. He’s summoned by his cousin Ko Sung-ki (Zo In-sung) to the site of a mutilated cow that Sung-ki and his fellow hunters discovered in the middle of the road. The cow’s corpse shows evidence of being attacked by some large animal with razor-sharp claws, which the hunters convince Bum-seok a tiger must have been responsible for despite the unlikelihood that a large cat would have been able to cross the minefields that lie between them and the rest of the continent. Upon returning to town, Bum-seok learns that several other locals have been killed, and his attempts to call in additional manpower are rebuffed due to wildfires that are raging elsewhere, prompting him to ally with a retired colonel named Ahn Nak-yeon (Lee Sang-hee), whom he finds hiding in a culvert after his own encounter with the monster. Out of sight, the monster rages on, as it leaves a trail of broken bodies and buildings in its wake. After Bum-seok accidentally shoots and kills a local who was hiding from the monster, he ends up facing the creature itself and narrowly escapes only because of assistance from his rocket launcher-toting rookie, Im Sung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon). After a long and costly conflict, the monster is killed, and its body turned over to a local surgeon to perform an autopsy, although she’s not able to cut through the creature’s hide with anything less than a chainsaw. Sung-ae assists with triage in a makeshift hospital, where she learns from one of the locals that he had seen several of the creatures in the woods, indicating that the danger is far from over. Elsewhere, Sung-ki and his hunting buddies are still looking for the tiger that threatens the village when they stumble upon a crashed spaceship in the forest, one that has a control room that features seating and buttons for very, very large crewmembers.

The creatures here are the film’s weakest point, in multiple ways. The alien designs are unique, and it’s a mark in the film’s favor that they’re individually designed with distinctive textures and faces, but that does not necessarily mean that they’re good. Western actors like Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, and Lost in Space’s Taylor Russell are credited here, and I suppose you can see the resemblance between them and the aliens that they voice (in an alien language) if you look hard enough, but I’m at a loss to understand what they bring to the film other than marquee appeal outside of Korea. The quality with which they are rendered on screen varies wildly from scene to scene, with some sequences looking like they were built for a PS2 game while others are smoother and more convincing. They’re a much more threatening presence when they’re not onscreen, when dismembered bodies are discovered in collapsing buildings or the only evidence of their presence is the far-off sounds of gunfire cut short by screaming. Characters can see over rooftops that cars are being thrown around like toys, and it’s quite effective.

I can concede that it’s likely that we’re meant to find the aliens uncannily human but off-putting considering the revelation that they are intelligent creatures seeking a lost child, who has already been killed by a hillbilly taxidermist named Yang-bae (Eum Moon-suk, a handsome former K-pop star who’s saddled with goofy teeth). The intention is to induce fear and then humanize them; I get that. I just don’t feel that it’s very successful, and it’s not all entirely down to the design. For one thing, this isn’t exactly new ground, given that the “man is the real monster” isn’t a novel monster-movie concept at this point, and the reason it’s so well-worn is because it forces the audience to look inward at their own prejudices. Here, however, the blame for the interspecies conflict falls solely in the lap of a trigger-happy bumpkin. No one is going to look at this man onscreen and see themselves, and it’s a change from the formula that demonstrates why the trope exists in the first place. There’s also a lot of sudden and unexpected lore that ends up being shoehorned in during the film’s final act, belabored exposition that largely comes via the form of not-very-interesting dialogue between Vikander and Fassbender (I mean, um … let me check my notes here … “J’aur” and “Ma’veyyo”). Some of it re-establishes what we’ve already gleaned from the scenes with our human characters, including their search for the missing alien child, but it also drops several extra-terrestrial proper nouns that are a lot to try and take in after two hours of runtime that was mostly a humans-versus-monsters movie. 

This is a film that feels incomplete, and it’s not just the cliffhanger ending that gives it that quality. Hope doesn’t feel like half of a narrative; it feels like a 95% complete monster film and a 35% complete sci-fi epic. That adds up to more than 100%, of course, which is reflected in the film’s whopping 156 minute runtime. That should be more than enough to tell a complete story, but it doesn’t. There are dangling plot threads on the human side that are left to be resolved in a sequel if one is made, most notably the fallout of Bum-seok’s shooting of a non-combatant, but it’s almost all the way there. The alien side of things is just getting started, with the sudden crashing of another, larger spaceship into a mountain on the horizon near the film’s conclusion, and all of the political machinations that are implied by the too-late info dump, which isn’t of interest to me in the slightest. Given that Na is known for releasing films at a glacial pace (the aforementioned The Wailing was his last picture, and it was released in 2016), it’s strange to me that he would create a film so open-ended and demanding of a sequel. Worse, Hope features such great action sequences that it demands to be seen on a big screen, but the ultimate experience is so taxing that it is a film that will work best when you’re at home and can take bathroom breaks, where the horseback battle with a galloping alien creature isn’t going to hit as hard. 

All of this sounds pretty negative, but I’m not trying to talk you out of experiencing the film. Reports that it is the best monster movie in years are no more an exaggeration than critical responses that the film is an overlong, narratively confused beast. Going in with that knowledge, I think you’ll still find plenty to enjoy; just caffeinate beforehand and feel free to run to the restroom when the aliens start talking to one another.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Resident Evil (2026)

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Screaming Mad George passed away this year, and there hasn’t been nearly enough public mourning over that loss for my taste. The 80s gore wizard was so uniquely talented as a visual artist (as especially evident in his collaborations with director Bryan Yuzna) that he would get special title card credits like “surrealistic make-up effects by Screaming Mad George” or “surrealistic visual design by Screaming Mad George,” each well earned by the mutant freak shows that would follow in all-timer gross-outs like Society, The Guyver, and Freaked!. The recent announcement of George’s passing was quietly received by the general movie-loving public, so it was nice to see him finally, properly honored by the surrealistic gore effects of Zach Cregger’s new Resident Evil adaptation, even if the homage was unintentional or indirect. The snowbound setting, mutated dogs, and tentacled humanoids of Resident Evil are naturally drawing a lot of comparisons to Rob Bottin’s legendary creature effects for The Thing, but I still felt the presence of George’s screaming-mad spirit in the theater opening weekend. There’s something about the anything-goes nightmare reconfigurations of the human form in Resident Evil‘s creature designs that can’t help but recall Screaming Mad George’s calling-card works in addition to Bottin’s, and I think it’s beautiful that you can now find the fucked-up surrealistic ideas he developed in a major studio adaptation of a video game playing in every multiplex across America. It used to be that you had to go to the video store to rent disreputable schlock like Silent Night Deadly Night 4: Initiation to see what screaming-mad stuff George was cooking up; now it’s being projected on thousands of screens nationwide.

It probably says something about the current moment in mainstream filmmaking that a splatter-gore horror comedy based on a video game feels like a no-brainer sure thing for a major studio to produce, when a few decades ago it would’ve been budgeted as a direct-to-video B-picture. Zach Cregger cashed in his industry clout after the unlikely success of his Oscar-winning whatsit Weapons to make the grossest, gnarliest horror comedy he could manage, timed perfectly to the industry’s current shift away from superhero actioners to memeable horrors and video game IP. There are no discernible themes or metaphors behind most of the imagery in Resident Evil. Instead of playing into the “elevated” trauma-metaphor horror trends of the past decade, it operates on pure video game logic. Weapons favorite Austin Abrams stars as a gig-economy worker who’s tasked to deliver a medical cooler to the zombie shoot-em-up game’s infamous Raccoon City headquarters, where a science lab is desperately awaiting his arrival. Along the way, it becomes clear that Raccoon City is ground zero for some kind of body-transforming virus breakout, making the delivery comically impossible as Abrams is attacked by one undead mutant freak after another. Structurally, it’s an all-in-one-night story built on crisis-to-crisis problem solving, like an absurdly gory redux of After Hours or Miracle Mile. Experientially, it feels like playing a video game as an unskilled novice, with Abrams’s in-over-his-head delivery driver voicing the audience’s overwhelmed, underprepared reactions to each unholy tentacled beast that lunges at him as if he were operating a game console controller instead of a real-world human body. Everything that happens to him is a nightmare, but it’s all for our low-stakes, time-passing entertainment.

It may sound like I’m downplaying Resident Evil‘s artistic merits by characterizing it as a themeless video game playthrough, but that is not my intent. It took Paul W.S. Anderson and Mila Jovovich five Resident Evil adaptations before they realized that this premise plays best as a playthrough spookshow in 2012’s Retribution, whereas Cregger’s vision for the property is immediately, sharply clear-eyed. Video-game storytelling tropes are a major asset to making sure this latest adaptation feels fresh and of-the-moment. In most instances, a CGI-animated throwback to practical gore effects of the Screaming Mad George era would feel disappointingly stale, but Resident Evil is just inventive enough in its constantly mutating creature designs and just modern enough in its video game puzzle-solving narrative to dig itself out of that 80s nostalgia pit. In a time when most directors are afraid to set their horror stories in the current moment because of the intrusive presence of smartphones, Cregger is one of the few who understands how those phones can add to his movie’s scares instead of detracting from them. The cold, isolated beam of the flashlight app on Abrams’s phone as he navigates the haunted house setting of each video-game-level sequence is essential to the movie’s visual palette and, by extension, to its modernity. Likewise, there’s something of-the-moment in the delivery dude’s under-his-breath jokiness as he’s assaulted by one brain-breaking mutant monstrosity after another, since that’s just what it feels like to leave the house to accomplish any basic task in recent years. All public life is an anxiety-inducing horror video game, but you do have to play along (if not only to make a little money), so the only option, really, is to joke to yourself along the way. I won’t claim that Resident Evil is the first or the best movie to modernize that screaming-mad 80s splatterfest sensibility to the current moment; it’s got titles like Deadstream, The Substance, and Cregger’s own Barbarian to compete with for those superlatives. It is super impressive to see that sensibility blown up to this major-studio scale, though, and it’s a hoot to holler at with first-weekend horror crowds instead of quietly watching it alone on a rented VHS tape.

-Brandon Ledet