action horror

The Mummy (1999)

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Recently, Brandon wrote a piece about the unfortunate position of The Mummy as Universal’s most side-lined classic horror character, and how the general public’s association of the title The Mummy with the 1999 action-adventure film directed by Stephen Sommers rather than the Karl Freund original cements The Mummy as a second-tier hanger-on. During the umpteenth viewing of the trailer for the upcoming release of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, a friend of mine leaned over to me in the theater and asked me a question about the frequency of these remakes, and I mentioned my own framework of the understanding about why The Mummy (the character) rarely works. Namely, you can make a movie about Wolfmen, Invisible Men, reanimated Promethei, and Dracula (et al) without the text being, necessitated by its nature, inherently racist. The Northern Hemisphere positively plundered Egypt and its historical sites, and the ongoing behavior of the British Museum acting in miniature on behalf of the colonialist experiment demonstrates that they are pathologically unable to comprehend the extent of the evil and shame inherent in their “expeditions.” Mummies were ground up into powder and used for paint pigmentation, medicine, and countless other things, again with Britain nationally acting as the microcosm of colonialist enterprise by rushing headlong into turning other people’s ancestors, a finite resource indeed, into a monetized enterprise. That’s why no big-budget mummy movie in the 21st century has actually been about a mummy; they’ve been about death gods creating avatars for themselves (the 2017 Tom Cruise film) or a child being possessed by something after spending some time in a sarcophagus (the new Lee Cronin film, at least based on the trailer). 

The last time that a Mummy was about a mummy was in 1999, when Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz memetically lit the libidos of bisexuals worldwide ablaze. Fraser plays Rick O’Connell, an American in interbellum Egypt for unknown reasons, whom we meet making a final stand against presumed locals while defending(?) some ruins. It’s a big guns-blazing action sequence that doesn’t really want you to ask questions about why Rick’s there, whose territory is rightfully whose, or other questions about the “veiled protectorate” period. Meanwhile in Cairo, Weisz’s Evelyn clumsily destroys a lot of priceless texts before her gadabout brother Jonathan (John Hannah) presents her with an artifact he pickpocketed that supposedly came from the lost city of Hamunaptra, a legendary treasure repository as well as “the city of the dead.” Evelyn, Rick, and Jonathan set out to find the city again, and find themselves in a race to the lost city with Beni (Kevin J. O’Connor), a cowardly man who was previously at Hamunaptra at the same time as Rick, and the American cowboys he’s guiding along the same path. Upon arrival, the Americans almost immediately release the undead ancient Egyptian priest Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo), who was mummified alive as a punishment for touching the Pharaoh’s concubine, from his tomb, unleashing plagues and the potential to end the world. 

I used to love this movie. I was in middle school when both it and its sequel were released, and as a kid who had grown up obsessed with Indiana Jones and with an interest in Egyptology, this was an exciting mash-up of horror and action-adventure that really hit my sweet spot. It also didn’t hurt that there were large swathes of time when it was on cable almost constantly, so it really left a mark on me. Going back to it now, however, I can’t help but find it a little distasteful, and a product of its time. Perhaps nowhere is this more clear than in the person of Ardeth Bay (Oded Fehr), a character descended from a long line of secret defenders of the pharaonic order. Despite living a life that implies an ongoing belief in the Egyptian pantheon of old, Ardeth praises Allah, something that was uncommon but unremarkable among heroic characters in films of the period but would become contentious just a couple of years later during the era of kneejerk American Islamophobia. Ardeth is also not played by an Egyptian actor (Fehr was born in Tel Aviv), nor is Imhotep (Vosloo is white South African), nor are the pharaoh (Aharon Ipalé is Israeli) or his Anck-su-namun (Patricia Velásquez is Venezuelan). The casting of the roles in the film outside of our white leads is classic Hollywood “brown is brown” racism of a bygone era, and watching this as an adult who is fully conscious of all of the implications greatly dulls one’s enthusiasm for what is, otherwise, an adventurous romp. 

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 upcoming release of the aforementioned Lee Cronin 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.) Preteens, like I was when I first saw it, are really the best demographic for this film, as its overwritten corny dialogue and telegraphed acting choices read like a throwback to old-timey pictures, until you’ve watched as many of them as I have and realize it’s more shallow parody than homage. Weisz and Fraser are sexy, yes, and they have great chemistry together, but Rick is much more of an asshole than I remember, and Evey, with her clumsy awkwardness and frustration at Cambridge’s rejection of her despite her outsized genius, feels like a fanfiction character, right down to her being a nepo baby. 

I wish that I could love this one as much as I did when I was younger, but most of the enjoyment that can be derived from it now comes at the film’s expense. If you have fond memories of it, let that sleeping dog lie; don’t go disturbing the sarcophagus of your memory.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (2026)

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Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, despite the seven years that have passed since the first Ready or Not was released, picks up right where it left off. Grace Le Domas née MacCaullay (Samara Weaving) has just survived until dawn while being hunted by her new husband’s family on her wedding night. As the paramedics and EMS arrive, she’s asked what happened, to which she just replies “in-laws.” While this was the punchline capper on the end of that film, here, an offscreen voice asks her what this means, moments before she faints from exhaustion and is taken to the hospital, complete with an ambulance ride that allows for her to have flashbacks to the first film each time she is defibrillated. When she awakens, she’s greeted by the local sheriff, who has handcuffed her to the bed so that he can explain clearly and plainly that she’s in a lot of trouble. Her sister, Faith (Kathryn Newton), arrives; despite their estrangement, Grace never bothered to remove Faith as her emergency contact. Grace also gets to recap the first film for the benefit of both her sister and the audience, which was, frankly, needed after such a long time between films. We witness some very basic signs of past conflict between them that the film will later belabor but, luckily, we move past that fairly quickly upon the arrival of Mr. Le Bail (aka Satan)’s lawyer (Elijah Wood). 

From here, we get introduced to the overall plot of this sequel. Grace’s survival of the Le Domas’ game of hide and seek means that the current “high seat” of the council of families who rule the world is up for grabs. Grace, along with Faith, will now be hunted across the grounds of a resort owned by the Danforths, twins named Ursula (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Titus (Shawn Hatosy), who are fighting to keep the Danforth family in the high chair. Also gathered for the occasion are Wan Chen Xing (Olivia Cheng), Viraj Rajan (Nadeem Umar-Khitab), and Ignacio (Néstor Carbonell) as well as his two children, the elder of whom was engaged to Grace’s late husband before he abandoned her for Grace. Ready, set, go. 

It’s not uncommon for horror sequels to follow the past of least resistance when crafting a follow up to a film that was never intended to be more than a one-and-done. Ready or Not 2, for as enjoyable as it was, seems to have chosen the easiest option for all of its story beats. The basic premise—girl must survive the night while being hunted by rich assholes—is essentially the same, and the expansive resort on which the most dangerous game is being pursued is little more than the Le Domas mansion and its grounds magnified. Other than the presence of an industrial washing machine and a wedding-decorated ballroom that allows for a bride-on-bride brawl, it’s functionally identical to the previous film’s locale. When there’s nothing fresh in the setting or the logline, the only places where you can shake things up a little are in the characters and the mythology, and Here I Come takes a stab at each of these, with mixed results. 

Character-wise, there’s nothing that Kathryn Newton’s Faith contributes to the narrative here. If you remove her from the film completely, you would have to come up with a different motivation for a couple of Grace’s choices, but nothing that would fundamentally change the narrative or the climax. Weaving carried Ready or Not with her performance, and I don’t buy that the sequel needed her to have a scene partner in order to make it work. It’s not that Newton’s a bad performer, but she’s completely superfluous here. Further, there’s a sense that this film wanted to, for lack of a better term, “go international,” but instead of taking that opportunity to shoot Here I Come in a substantially visually different location, it’s mostly just an excuse to gather a cast of actors of color to act as cannon fodder for the hunt before the finale focuses solely on the MacCaullays versus the Danforths. You’re not going to catch me complaining about getting to see Gellar for so much of this film (she looks great, by the way), but it is to its detriment that so many of its non-white characters read as caricatures who die hilariously while the white villains get more nuance and screen time. Other than Ursula and the lawyer, none of these new characters are particularly memorable. 

That leaves the lore and the mythology to do most of the heavy lifting in the novelty department, and boy, there sure is a lot of it. Remember how the rules of the world of assassins in the John Wick films just kept getting bigger and more consequential, to the point where it was bogging down what we were all here for? Here I Come does much the same. Woods is very charming as Le Bail’s advocate, and the elaborate bylaws of the various Satanic covenants and their attendant loopholes do push us through to a visually dynamic conclusion that sees Grace get to don a cool, new, evil wedding dress. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the elaboration of Le Bail’s big scary book of infernal torts and nefarious estate dispersal regulations makes for exciting viewing, however. No one ever even seems to consider suggesting an alternative to Grace marrying Titus to save her and her sister’s life, namely, why don’t Grace and Ursula just get married? Does Mr. Le Bail not recognize marriage equality? This is the devil we’re talking about; are we supposed to believe that he has the same views on marriage that Kim Davis does? (Wait, actually, strike that; it actually does hold water that they would both be evil.) We do get to see a series of load-bearing evil statutes collapse in a series of dominos, but it starts to feel a bit like edutainment aimed at assisting the viewer in studying for the bar exam in hell. 

All of those negatives having been said, this is still a fair bit of fun. It’s going to suffer in comparison to its spiritual sibling They Will Kill You, and that’s going to be warranted; that film does the whole “one woman fights evil cultists to save her sister” plot with more style and flair, even if the sister subplot in both is mere window dressing. But while that was primarily a film focused on its visual dynamism and elaborate fight choreography, this one is more interested in playing the hits from its predecessor, with an additional layer of familial conflict that gets run into the ground long before the film resolves it. In the meantime, though, the gore is still delightful and fun, and the script is peppered with some pretty good jokes. The best fight sequence finds Grace fighting Ignacio’s daughter in their dual wedding dresses, ineffectually flailing at one another after both are doused with pepper spray. Ignacio and his daughter’s incompetence with their weapons in comparison to his hypercompetent young son is a good bit, and it doesn’t wear out its welcome. An early use of the aforementioned industrial washer leads to one gruesome early kill of the MacCaullay women’s assailants, even if very few that follow are as inventive or funny. Weaving also continues to shine here, as she does in everything she appears in. If you’re going to choose only one movie about rich Satanists getting taken out by a girl from an abusive home who’s only involved in the events of the film because of a threat to her sister in theaters this month, They Will Kill You is the better choice, but if you’re going to do a double feature, these will pair well with one another . . . if you watch Here I Come first.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

They Will Kill You (2026)

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I had mixed feelings upon first seeing the trailer for They Will Kill You, the first English feature from Russian director Kirill Sokolov, who previously directed two Russian language films that, based on their trailers, appear to have a similar tone and style as this one. At first, I was very excited for the film, since it looked like a lot of fun, but I was also annoyed that its advertising felt like it gave away too much of the movie’s plot. Although that’s true to a certain extent, I was pleasantly surprised that there were still many more twists and turns to come in the feature itself than the promotional materials let on. 

Ten years after nonfatally shooting their abusive father and failing to rescue her younger sister from his clutches, a woman calling herself Isabella (Zazie Beetz) appears at The Virgil, an extremely upscale Manhattan hotel, introducing herself as the new maid. After she’s given a brief tour of the maids’ floor by head of housekeeping Lily (Patricia Arquette), she’s ushered into her room, where she immediately barricades the door. In the night, several cloaked figures (including Heather Graham and Tom Felton) manage to enter her room a different way and attempt to kill her, alternately calling her a “sacrifice” and an “offering.” They quickly realize, however, that their latest lamb to be led to the slaughter is more than she appears, and that she’s not trapped in The Virgil with them; they’re trapped inside with her. 

“Isabella,” who reveals her name is Asia, has a motivation that’s pretty straightforward. After being paroled from prison, where she was incarcerated for the attempted murder of her father, she went to the place where her younger sister was last seen, in the hopes of saving her from whatever shenanigans were happening in the place. Some of the set up is a little flimsy, but it’s all just window dressing to get to the film’s purpose: showing Zazie Beetz going utterly feral against hordes of cultists with axes, machetes, shotguns, and any and every weapon she can get her hands on. It’s a gory splatterfest of decapitations, crushed eyeballs, impaled hands, exploding heads, screwdriver stabbings, and flaming hatchets, and it’s an objective success in the glorious violence department. 

The action choreography is extremely competent. After more than two decades of Bourne Identity-inspired shake cams and excessive editing, it’s refreshing to see that the dedication to craft that John Wick reminded everyone was possible continues to inspire successive action filmmakers. It’s that franchise that this film seems to draw a lot of inspiration from, especially with regards to the lead character’s virtually god-mode fighting prowess and the setting of a specialized hotel that comes preloaded with mythology, lore, and rules of engagement. Its other major inspiration seems to be the filmography of disgraced director Quentin Tarantino, most especially Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill; its order isn’t necessarily anachronic in the same way that those films are, but the chronology of the story often stops for a scene or two to reveal some past event that informs the current scene, and there are certain moments where Asia’s movements and poses seem to be styled directly on Uma Thurman’s The Bride. 

Visually, the film has a lot of style. Although the film foregoes the Bourne Identity style, that doesn’t mean that the audience is watching these excellent action sequences play out statically. The camera is constantly moving, following characters around hotel corners and through crawlspaces and ducts on a moving track. There’s one really excellent oner that follows Asia and Lily facing off in a hallway that moves toward Lily, gives Arquette a moment to deliver one of her trademark bits of visceral vitriol, and then tracks back to the other end of the hallway to complete an orbital shot around battle-poised Asia before continuing back into the room she just exited. It’s really good stuff. The film also makes excellent use of empty/black space, as the film will sometimes “zoom out” to show only a hallway or a vertical tunnel so that we can track where every party is in The Virgil’s labyrinthine structure, and it looks fantastic. 

I don’t want to reveal too much about the multiple directions that this one takes narratively. I thought that the trailer gave away too much, but unlike recent spoiled-by-the-trailer films that come to mind like Abigail and Speak No Evil, this one makes you think you know too much about it, before pulling the rug from under you. It’s not that this is a plot that you’ve never seen before; you almost certainly have, but it’s worth remembering that the reason you’re here is to see Zazie Beetz bludgeon some Satanists into pulp, not to get caught up on loopholes and infernal contract law. That having been said, there are some things that it’s really worth keeping a secret until one can see the film themselves. This one probably won’t be in theaters too much longer, based on its current box office performance, but it’s worth seeing with others in a group setting to get the maximum fun factor out of it. Then again, I don’t blame you if you’d rather wait til it hits streaming so you don’t have to see the same jokes from The Devil Wears Prada 2 twice in both the film’s trailer and the “silence your phones” ad before the feature starts. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Predator: Badlands (2025)

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Following his successful first entry into the Predator franchise in 2022 with Prey (a fresh take on the concept that featured an 18th Century Comanche woman taking on a member of the Yautja, better known to us as Predators), Dan Trachtenberg has returned to the big screen with Predator: Badlands. This time, we’re back in the far future, in days when the Weyland-Yutani corporation (of the Alien franchise) is extending its tendrils of power into the depths of space. It’s a fun action flick that takes place on a fully-realized alien death world, featuring minimal characters, and it’s a great ride. 

The film opens on Yautja Prime, as young warrior Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) prepares for the hunt that will prove his worthiness to be given the Predators’ famous cloaking device. His brother Kwei appears to help him prepare, and the two engage in a duel that Dek is unable to win, but he proves his fighting spirit by refusing to yield. The two warriors’ father, Njohrr, appears on the scene and derides Kwei for failing to kill Dek, the runt of the clan, as he was ordered. Kwei is slain by their father as Dek, aboard his ship, is auto-launched to the “death planet” of Genna, where the unkillable beast Kalisk resides, with Dek intending to bring back the Kalisk’s head as his trophy and prove his father wrong, ensuring that Kwei’s death was not in vain. Dek crashes on the planet and soon meets a polite, personable Weyland-Yutani android named Thia (Elle Fanning). Although he initially refuses her assistance in navigating the treacherous flora and fauna of Genna as the Yautja code requires them to hunt alone, he is able to compartmentalize her as a “tool” and self-justify accepting her help. Attaching Thia’s upper half to his back to act as guide (her lower half was previously torn off by the Kalisk), the two set out to take down the great beast, all while Thia’s twin “sister” Tessa (Fanning again) reboots and resumes her mission of capturing the Kalisk for the company’s bio-weapons research division. 

There’s a lot to like here. Thia and Dek make for a really fun pair of characters, with her (uncharacteristic for a W-Y synth) helpful, bubbly, and jovial attitude playing against his brusque, narrow-minded, laser-focused mentality to comedic success. For a character whose face is entirely prosthetic, Dek also conveys a fair amount of emotion, expressing vulnerability, surprise, and grief, and that this works despite the fact that this is a Predator we’re talking about is a strong mark in the film’s favor. Fanning, as the person with a human face (even if there are no humans at all in the movie overall), has to do most of the emotional heavy lifting, but she carries it off, and her performance here has me pretty excited to see her again later this year in Sentimental Value, even if that’s going to be a very different film from this one tonally. She gets to join the ever-growing ranks of 2025 features that happen to be about twins or otherwise feature dual performances: twice the Michael B. Jordan in Sinners, double Dylan O’Briens in Twinless, Robert Pattinson as Mickeys 17 and 18 in Mickey 17, Theo James as “good” and evil twins in The Monkey, the Mias Goth in Frankenstein, and [redacted spoiler] in Superman. Fanning’s turn as the less-likable android Tessa is fun to see, especially given that Thia’s dialogue about her “sister” is praiseworthy and ebullient because of Thia’s personality, and we expect that Tessa will be like her, but when we do finally meet her, she’s ruthless, tactical, and efficient.

It’s a real change of pace to move the point of view from that of the human characters—who are always potentially prey to the Predators that give the franchise its name—to one of the Yautja instead, and that choice brings with it an interesting perspective flip on both them and the W-Y androids. Dek and Kwei’s father Njohrr is representative of a fairly bog standard “alien warrior race” archetype: shows preference among his brood for his strongest offspring, toxically belittles his weaker offspring to the point of attempting to cull said child from the bloodline, spends most of his screentime talking about “honor,” clans, rites of passage, etc. Despite this upbringing, Kwei sees the inner strength in Dek, and has never forgotten that Dek saved his life when they were younger, and in so doing breaks through his familial and cultural programming, rebelling against their father in order to give Dek the chance to prove himself. Thia and Tessa are specifically noted to have been designed and manufactured to be more “sensitive” than most synths, but despite this, Tessa is ultimately completely loyal to the corporation, once again represented in the form of an interface with “MU/TH/UR.” Humans are special because we have the ability to unlearn the ideologies that we receive, passively and actively, from our guardians and our environments; many people never slip out of these bonds, but many more do, and becoming more empathetic and kind is growth. Kwei, as the brother of the Yautja half of our protagonist duo, exceeded his programming; Tessa, as the sister of the synth half, never does, even though it’s clear that Thia is capable of (and undergoes) this evolution. The creations of humanity, made in the image of humanity, demonstrate less of that humanity in comparison to the scaly, scary menace with mandibles. 

This is a well constructed screenplay. In addition to the movie being about two beings exceeding and transcending their programming (both literal and cultural), it’s also worth noting that the parallels between the two sibling pairs extend to both of them being threatened by a parental figure. Kwei dies defending Dek from Njhorr, as failure to perform up to their father’s standards is a death sentence. The same is true for Tessa, who is threatened by MU/TH/UR (say it out loud if you haven’t seen an Alien movie in a while) with “decommissioning” if she fails to secure the Kalisk sample. Beyond that, it’s structured pretty similarly to Prey in that we get just the right amount of planting and payoff for all of the things that Dek learns during the course of his hunt and how he uses the resources around him to achieve his goals. That skeletal symmetry in each of Trachtenberg’s outings belies the vast aesthetic and environment differences that make Badlands feel fresh and new. The creature (and malevolent flora) designs are a lot of fun, and the whole thing feels very real and immersive. There are some moments of summer blockbuster cheese (despite the film’s autumn release), with the most groanworthy element for my viewing companion being the appearance of Dek’s mother in the film’s final sequel bait moment, while I think I was most distracted by the way that Dek tames an acid-spitting snake to sit on his shoulder like the typical Predator gun. It’s goofy, but the movie takes itself mostly seriously, with positive results. It still includes an Aliens-inspired mech-on-monster fight, but it refrains from reusing (read: misusing) that sequence’s pivotal line, which is more restraint than a certain other movie I could mention. Worth seeing on the big screen! 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Arcadian (2024)

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Like most hopeless, depraved movie nerds, I’ll watch pretty much anything with Nicolas Cage in it, since he’s a reliably entertaining performer no mattery the quality of the project signing that week’s paycheck.  That means I’ve seen a lot of mediocre DTV action movies over the years, often ones where Cage’s prominence on the poster is outright dishonest about his prominence in the picture advertised.  I had somehow deluded myself into believing this slumming-it phase of Cage’s career was coming to a close, though, since recent projects like Mandy, Pig, and Dream Scenario were starting to reveal a light at the end of that particular sewer tunnel.  Cage’s latest made-for-streaming action horror Arcadian—which locally premiered at Overlook Film Festival last weekend—was a reality check on that delusion.  Between its post-apocalyptic setting, its grim-grey lighting, and Nicolas Cage dutifully showing up just along enough to earn a sizeable payment to the IRS, Arcadian feels as if it’s about five to ten years behind the times, even when it’s trying its hardest to show you something new.

Cage stars as a single, grieving father who moves his surviving family to remote farmland at the start of The Apocalypse.  His twin boys get increasingly difficult to manage when they age into teenage grumps, which makes it even more difficult to survive the nightly attacks of the mutant creatures who ended modern civilization in the first place.  Since there is no shortage of reference points for this kind of doomsday prepper action-horror, Arcadian doesn’t put much effort into explaining the details of the world Cage & his boys are fighting to survive.  Whether it’s the artsy abstraction of It Comes at Night or the weekly soap opera of The Walking Dead, you’ve seen this exact setup before.  What you haven’t seen is the peculiar biological details of these exact monsters: hairy ostrich-wolves who clap their jaws like chattering-teeth novelty toys and travel as a pack in a rolling Ferris wheel formation.  There’s plenty of intrigue there for anyone drawn in by Cage’s name & face on the poster, which does a lot to make up for him spending half of the runtime offscreen, comatose.  When he suddenly perks up for the climactic fight against the impossible wolf-beasts, you can practically see him flipping on his It Factor movie star presence like a light switch.  It’s only a few seconds of screentime, but it’s exactly what you paid to see.

Arcadian is decently entertaining for a Shudder-brand creature feature, by which I mean its monsters’ design is inventive & upsetting enough to hold your attention despite the banality of their surroundings.  Director Benjamin Brewer’s most prominent IMDb credit to date is as the lead visual effects artist for Everything Everywhere All at Once, which shows here in the ambition & absurdity of the wolf-beasts’ hideous biology.  The dark, muddled color palette and handheld cinematography style are more befitting of a war drama than a creature feature, but again it’s worth pushing through that tedium to get a better look at the monsters.  And hey, there’s still making popular, big-budget Quiet Place sequels long after that series has maintained any purpose or novelty, so I can’t say this film is entirely out of date.  Brewer leveraged Cage’s image on a poster and piggybacked off a familiar mainstream horror template to show off his prowess for inventive, impressive visual effects.  I can’t be mad at that kind of Roger Corman marketing hustle, especially since Cage has lent this likeness to far, far worse.

-Brandon Ledet

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024)

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The current run of American Godzilla movies so badly, nakedly want what Marvel Studios had in its Avengers era that they’re often referred to as The MonsterVerse, named of course after the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  We’re now at a point where the MCU’s glory days are quickly fading in the rearview, but the Marvelification of Godzilla has just been completed.  After a few standalone stylistic experiments that mired Godzilla in grim-grey CGI drudgery and drafted his longtime frenemy King Kong into the Vietnam War, the two towering kaiju have been teamed up by their own Avengers Initiative in a couple dumb-fun action blockbusters designed to sell some opening-weekend popcorn and to tease the next popcorn-seller down the line, whenever another one inevitably arrives.  2021’s Godzilla vs Kong at least maintained some of the colorful cartoon spectacle of classic kaiju battles like 1963’s King Kong vs. Godzilla, arriving as a much-needed return to grand-scale filmmaking in those early years of COVID precautions.  In their second shared title, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, that classic Toho spirit has instead been completely replaced by the quippy, zippy action comedy of a Guardians of the Galaxy sequel.  Immensely talented actors Rebecca Hall, Dan Stevens, and Brian Tyree Henry stand around spewing exposition and inane “Well, that just happened” punchlines while CGI gods fight to start or stop the apocalypse in the sky above.  1980s pop tunes loop continuously on old school tape decks as contrast to the rest of the film’s future tech (including a giant mechanical arm built to enhance King Kong’s already mighty super-strength).  All that’s missing, really, is a talking raccoon, but hey you gotta leave something on the table for the next one.

The New Empire is much more flattering as a King Kong sequel than it is as a Godzilla one, mostly because that series has so many fewer, lower points of comparison.  Godzilla currently has 38 films to his name, while Kong only has 12 – most of which are not tied to the 1933 original.  Within that lineage, The New Empire works best as a stealth remake of 1933’s rushed-to-market Son of Kong.  Most of the best scenes involve Kong taking a young, violent, childlike ape under his tutelage as a mentor.  In an early fight, Kong uses him as a weapon, beating back other, meaner apes with the bitey little bastard’s limp body.  Later, they fully team up as a makeshift father-son duo to take down a Richard III-style mad king and free the enslaved apes who live in the even hollower Earth beneath Kong’s Hollow Earth stomping grounds.  By contrast, Godzilla doesn’t get nearly as much to do.  He mostly just swims to an underwater gender clinic to charge up from blue to pink, emerges to join the fight against the mad king in the final act, and then takes an angry cat nap once everything calms down.  Other surprise kaiju combatants join the battle in the back half, but none are as surprising as the Mechagodzilla reveal in the previous picture.  Mostly, the monsters just follow the same patterns of CGI superheroics we’ve already seen countless times in the past decade, just scaled up to skyscraper size for a false sense of escalation.  Meanwhile, the humans on the ground hang out in CSI-style tech labs, narrating the action like WWE announcers.  Director Adam Wingard does his best to add some style & personality to the proceedings, flinging fluorescent goop at the non-existent camera’s “lens” every time a monster is defeated, but style & personality is mostly just window-dressing when it comes to this kind of four-quadrant blockbuster filmmaking.

If there’s any clear artistic path forward for the American Godzilla picture, it might be in more sincerely tackling the POV of the fictional Indigenous tribes who worship & manage the kaiju of Hollow Earth.  So far in the MonsterVerse, the Indigenous peoples associated with each creature have been exoticized with the same old-school Indiana Jones adventurism that’s persisted in both the King Kong & Godzilla series since their respective 1930s & 50s origins.  There’s an unexplored angle in telling a story from their perspective instead of framing it through outsiders’ eyes, an approach already forged by the recent Predator prequel Prey. Of course, despite including the word “new” in its title, The New Empire isn’t much interested in new ideas or in unexplored angles on old ones.  It’s content to repeat what’s worked previously for another easy payout, whether repeating the cartoonish CGI smash-em-ups of Godzilla vs Kong or repeating the crossover superhero team-ups of the Avengers films.  There isn’t much awe or novelty in that approach to sure-thing, big-budget filmmaking, but there is some joy to be found in its familiarity – however minor.

-Brandon Ledet

Project Wolf Hunting (2023)

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Often, when movie buffs say “They don’t make ’em like they used to,” they’re lamenting the loss of movie-star vehicles, serious dramas for adults, or mainstream movies that include any visual depiction of sex.  The “They don’t make ’em like they used to” complaint could extend to much trashier tropes & genres that have disappeared from American multiplexes in the past few decades, though, and it occurred to me while watching the Korean gore fest Project Wolf Hunting.  There is no time in history when a major American studio would have produced a film as grotesquely violent as Project Wolf Hunting for wide theatrical release, but it still plays like a nostalgic throwback to the blockbuster days of 1990s Hollywood.  Specifically, it’s a revival of the preposterous prison thrillers of that era, titles like Con Air, The Rock, Death Warrant, Ricochet, and Alien³.  Back when movies used to be led by action stars instead of IP brands, there was a wave of grimy, idiotic thrillers set in futuristic superprisons, which repentant or wrongfully convicted dirtbags played by Jean Claude Van Damme or Nicolas Cage would have to escape via brute lone-wolf strength & communal riots.  Project Wolf Hunting wistfully calls back to that era in its chaotic “story” of prisoner cargo ship mutiny, but it also triples down on the genre’s hyperviolence with tons more blood & viscera than all its previous titles combined.  Tons.  It’s an exciting change until it’s a numbing one, and by the end I would have much rather returned to the dinky charm of its Bruckheimer Era predecessors than spend another minute slipping around in its red-dyed corn syrup slop.  They just don’t make over-the-top prison thrillers like they used to, and apparently they never will again.

It appears that even the team behind Project Wolf Hunting knows that the nonstop hyperviolence of its cargo ship prison break can be numbingly monotonous, since it only plays the scenario straight for its opening hour.  The premise starts simple enough, with a ludicrous prisoner-exchange transport returning all of Korea’s cruelest, most dangerous criminals from their Philippines hiding place for trial & punishment via one lone, vulnerable cargo ship.  Of course, their criminal buddies on the outside seize the opportunity to start a jail-break riot on the ship, and most of the first hour is nonstop slaughter of cops & prison guards at the receiving end of bullets & blades.  Just as the movie’s threatening to tire itself out halfway into its runtime, the prisoners accidentally free a new flavor of violent threat they didn’t know was being transported in tandem: a Frankensteined supersoldier that has been kept “alive” via sci-fi superdrugs since Japanese experiments in World War II.  The zombie monster among them has stapled-shut eyes, a mouth full of maggots, and a bottomless appetite for “extreme & indiscriminate violence.”  He’s an impossible intrusion into what starts as a fairly pedestrian prison break thriller, so you’d think he’d change the film’s rhythms & trajectory in an exciting way.  Not really.  All the invincible Frankenmonster really does as a late addition to the party is allow the bloodbath to continue after practically all the cops have been destroyed, giving the prisoners a single target to focus their fists, knives, and bullets on, now to their own peril.  The practical gore and close-quarters combat is impressively staged throughout, with all victims & villains spraying the supercharged blood geysers familiar to vintage martial arts films like Lady Snowblood (and their modern homages like Kill Bill).  Whether they’re impressive enough to justify two consecutive hours of “extreme & indiscriminate violence” is up for debate.

The #1 thing that would’ve made me more enthusiastic about Project Wolf Hunting is if it were made when I was still a teenage gore hound.  The #2 thing is if it had a more charismatic action-hero lead.  This is the kind of large ensemble-cast action thriller where the main objective is to pack the cargo ship with as many high-pressure blood bags as possible without bothering to assign any one of them much of a distinctive personality.  The range between the most sensitive, pensive criminal on the ship and the scariest, most violent one is pretty wide, and no one really matters between those two extremes outside the brutal novelty of their individual kill scenes.  Because they’re all professional scumbags & sociopaths, they don’t even have much motivation to distinguish personalities amongst each other.  In the aggro parlance of the film, everyone is either an “asshole”, a “bastard,” a “motherfucker”, or a “piece of shit” – all unified in their collective need to “shut the fuck up.”  I always find that kind of shouted-expletive dialogue to be the telltale sign of a weak screenplay, but I also don’t know how much that matters in this particular instance.  Project Wolf Hunting‘s greatest assets are its value as a revival of the preposterous prison thriller genre and its eagerness to overwhelm the audience with bone-crunching gore.  As someone with a baseline affection for any monster movie with a high-concept gimmick premise, I’m willing to overlook a lot of its narrative shortcomings to enjoy its practical-effects violence.  It’s a pretty good movie in that context.  All it really needed to be a great one was a charismatic action star to help anchor the audience amidst the sprawling mayhem.  Unfortunately, they don’t really make those anymore.

-Brandon Ledet

End of Days (1999)

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Every year I watch an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie on my birthday as a gift to myself.  It’s a small, often private ritual that I hold sacred, and it’s one I plan months in advance.  Which version of Arnold am I going to celebrate with – the one who gets in gunfights with alligators?, the one who gives birth to a baby with his own adult face?, or maybe a double-trouble combo of Arnie clones?  The possibilities are endless.  This year, the decision was easy.  I happened to find a used DVD copy of the nü-metal Schwarzenegger relic End of Days on a thrift store shelf a few months before my birthday, making my selection obvious.  Then, just a couple days before this year’s Big Event, a tabloid new story came out about Schwarzenegger’s abhorrent behavior on the set of End of Days.  Specifically, he was accused of deliberately farting in the face of his co-star Miriam Margoles during their fight scene.  And did he apologize for this workplace transgression?  No, dear reader, he laughed.  Beyond confirming yet again that all millionaires are assholes, it was kind of a nothing news item, worthy only of a chuckle while scrolling though headlines on the old Twitter feed.  It was the easily most press End of Days has gotten in this century, though, and its timing meant that this year I was celebrating my birthday with The Fart Movie.

Anyway, the Nü-Metal Arnöld movie holds up fairly well.  There was once a time in my life where any vaguely gothy movie with a prominent KoRn single on its tie-in soundtrack was an instant 5-star classic in my eyes, so I can’t say I enjoyed it as much now as I did when it was a Blockbuster rental, but it’s still a hoot.  End of Days is a product that only could have been made in that exact spiked-collars-and-wallet-chains era, marketing itself specifically as Y2k horror.  Set “three nights before every computer fails,” the film dreads the approach of the year 2000 with the same dread Christian doomsayers approach the birth of antichrist.  In fact, it directly links the two strands of paranoia.  You see, the Mark of the Beast has been misinterpreted in modern translations of the Bible.  That “666” has been flipped by mistake, making 1999 the Year of the Beast, when Satan would return to Earth to choose his bride and the mother of his world-destroying son.  The oncoming worldwide computer crashes of Y2k appear to be coincidental, but they’re frequently cited by radio DJs in the background as a parallel end-of-the-world scenario.  In case you don’t remember, Y2k never happened the way its biggest doomsayers promised, but Gabriel Byrne sure does arrive on Earth as a father-to-be Satan in this film, and there’s only one Austrian-accented supercop in all of NYC who can stop him before it’s too late: Jericho Cane.

End of Days takes the genre mashup “action horror” about as literally as it possibly can.  Satan’s quest to become a father before the Times Square ball drops on Y2k positions the film as the 90s blockbuster version of Rosemary’s Baby, but it’s the 90s version of Rosemary’s Baby that would’ve been produced by Jerry Bruckheimer.  Sure, there are spooky Catholic ceremonies behind every locked door in every NYC church, as the city’s priests wage a secret Good vs Evil battle with the Prince of Darkness.  And there are plenty of CG demons, back-alley crucifixions, and Satanic orgies to keep the teenage edgelord KoRn fans in the audience drooling on their JNCOs.  None of it is supposed to be especially scary, though.  It’s all just badass, gothy set dressing for a standard-issue Arnie action flick, complete with helicopter chases and storefront explosions.  Schwarzenegger plays such a cliché version of an action-hero cop that he borders on parody, especially in an early scene when he’s introduced pouring coffee, pizza, Pepto, and Chinese leftovers into a blender as a makeshift hangover cure – like a noir goblin.  Luckily, that approach means he still gets to land some of his standard action hero one-liners despite the oppressive gloominess of the setting, like in a scene where he tells Satan, “I want you to go to Hell,” and Satan shoots back, “You see, the problem is sometimes Hell goes to you.”  That’s some beautiful late-90s cheese, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

End of Days has a lot of problems.  Its 2-hour runtime is super bloated for a movie with so few ideas.  Its female lead, Robin Tunney, doesn’t have much to do besides wait around as a damsel in Satanic distress (and to vaguely resemble Brittany Murphy).  Worst yet, Kevin Pollak was brought in as sarcastic comic relief, as if the producers weren’t convinced Arnie wasn’t funny enough on his own (despite being, hands down, the funniest action lead of all time) and somehow thought Kevin Frickin Pollak was the solution to that non-problem.  Still, it feels like an essential artifact in both nü-metal & Y2k genre cinema, bridging the gap between two really dumb things I cared way too much about when I was 12 years old, with my all-time favorite action star at the helm (and sometimes on the cross).  It has an interesting production history too.  Both Sam Raimi & Guillermo del Toro turned down the chance to direct before it fell in the lap of anonymous workman Peter Hyams.  It was also written with Tom Cruise in mind to star, which would’ve changed the entire tone & meaning of the project.  It’s the kind of what-could’ve-been scenario that really fires up your imagination . . . until the conversation is dominated by the fact that Schwarzenegger is a bully who farted in the face of Miriam Margoles.  Oh well, at least he didn’t fart into an open flame, since flames & explosives were such a prominent aspect of its Satanic set decoration.  A lot more people could’ve been hurt.

-Brandon Ledet

The Seventh Curse (1986)

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I have plenty of stubborn genre biases that I need a lot of handholding to get past; I need a movie to be really over the top in its style or novelty to bother with a genre that generally bores me.  I don’t care for Westerns, but watching Kate Winslet destroy an entire town by sewing pretty dresses in The Dressmaker is enough to make me get over that.  I don’t have patience for war films, but watching Jean-Pierre Jeunet warp his war epic A Very Long Engagement into an over-stylized twee romance was perversely thrilling.  Moonraker had to launch James Bond into outer space as a cheap cash-in on the Star Wars craze for me to go out of my way to see a 007 film.  However, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a movie go as deliciously, deliriously over the top to break through my boredom with a specific genre than The Seventh Curse – a supernatural Hong Kong action classic that pulls off the unique miracle of keeping me awake for the entirety of an Indiana Jones adventure.

I normally don’t vibe with Indiana Jones-style international swashbuckling at all, but this copyright-infringing mind-melter hits the exact level of bonkers mayhem I need to get past that deeply ingrained disinterest.  While actual Indiana Jones pictures fire off dusty nostalgia triggers that have been old hat since at least the era of radio serials, The Seventh Curse is overflowing with imagination, irreverence, and explosive brutality in every single scene that you will not find replicated in any other movie, including the Hollywood blockbusters it lovingly “borrows” from.  This is a film where a James Bond-styled super-agent goes on international Indiana Jones adventures into ancient temples, ultimately teaming up with a Rambo-knockoff sidekick to defeat a flying Xenomorph with batwings.  Moreso than Indiana Jones, it reminded me a lot of the post-modern Brucesploitation picture The Dragon Lives Again, in which “Bruce Lee” teams up with Popeye the Sailor Man to beat up James Bond, Dracula, The Exorcist, and “Clint Eastwood” in Hell.  That wild abandon in random assemblages of copyright violations is absolutely thrilling in both cases, but The Seventh Curse is better funded, better conceived, and better staged than The Dragon Lives Again by pretty much every metric.  It’s also far preferable to any actual Indiana Jones film, even if it could not exist without their influence (and a little help from Jones’s loose collection of Hollywood superfriends).

In radio serial tradition, the film opens mid-adventure, where our pathetically named hero Chester Young untangles a delicate hostage negotiation by punching & kicking a legion of heavily armed Bad Guys to death.  While celebrating with his 007 sexual conquest after that mission, a pustule forms & explodes on his leg, spraying blood all over his high-thread-count bedsheets.  He then explains, in flashback, that this sudden fit of body horror is part of a supernatural curse that he’s been suffering for a full year – branded upon his soul by an ancient Thai god when he disrupted a human sacrifice ceremony on a previous mission.  This curse will soon destroy his body for good if he does not return to Thailand to confront the witchcraft-wielding Worm Tribe who cursed him a year ago, which launches us into another, grander adventure involving a flying cannibal fetus, a shape-shifting zombie god, the ritualistic sacrifice of human babies, gratuitous nudity and, of course, a bat-winged Xenomorph.  The antiqued sets & triumphant musical accompaniment frame Chester Young’s latest international mission in an Indiana Jones genre context, but the practical minute-to-minute details of that mission are far wilder & more thrilling than what you’d expect from the aesthetic.

I’m currently reading an encyclopedia of Hong Kong action cinema titled Sex and Zen & A Bullet in the Head, which is overloaded with hundreds of capsule reviews of the once-vibrant HK movie industry’s greatest hits.  Every single blurb in that book makes every single title sound like the most explosively badass movie you’ve never seen, fixating on that industry’s unmatched talent for absurd plot details, tactile fight choreography, and for-their-own-sake visual gags.  I want to be incredulous that the book’s bottomless hype for Hong Kong genre classics can’t be matched by the low-budget mayhem those movies actually delivered, but I don’t know; maybe it’s all true.  I was pushed to bump The Seventh Curse to the top of my Hong Kong Classics watchlist by our friends at We Love To Watch when they recently guest-hosted one of our podcast episodes, and it totally delivered on its reputation as an unhinged, uninhibited genre gem.  Between this glorious Indiana Jones revision, The Holy Virgin vs. The Evil Dead, and the few John Woo movies I’ve reviewed for the site, I’m starting to convince myself that the hype is real; all 1,000 of those recommended titles might actually be that badass.  The bummer is that most of them are either impossible or unaffordable to (legally) access in the US. By some unholy miracle, The Seventh Curse is currently only a $1.50 VOD rental, though, and it’s almost incredible enough to talk me into going into debt chasing down the rest of the Sex and Zen & A Bullet in the Head titles one-by-one.

-Brandon Ledet

Army of the Dead (2021)

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Thanks to the post-production remodeling of the mythical “director’s cut” of Justice League for HBO Max, there has been a ton of online critical reclamation of Zack Snyder’s artistry this year.  The “It’s pretty good, actually!” consensus on The Snyder Cut has earned him the same “vulgar auteur” status previously bestowed upon filmmakers like Tony Scott, Paul WS Anderson, and Michael Bay – real meathead types.  Personally, I’m not seeing the vulgar genius of Snyder’s work, at least not in relation to his absurdly expensive Justice League revision.  That 4hr superhero epic registered with me as the pinnacle of plot obsession in contemporary cinema, getting so mired in the connective tissue between action sequences that it transcends the medium altogether by becoming Television.  The Snyder Cut couldn’t be faulted for being erratic or messy like the previous edit of Justice League, but in smoothing out all rough edges on that compromised vision, Snyder created a pure-plot experience completely devoid of recognizable humanity or imagination. I almost admire The Snyder Cut for pushing the modern superhero picture to its obvious endgame (a $400mil TV miniseries), but I might just be telling myself that so that I feel like I got something out of the time investment.  Either way, it’s interesting as a cultural curio but aggressively mediocre as entertainment media, so that the director is only worth engaging with for the hype he inexplicably generates.  It’s less that the emperor wears no clothes; it’s that I don’t understand why everyone’s so ecstatically complimenting the emperor’s Ed Hardy t-shirt.

Even with my Snyder Cut skepticism still festering as an open wound, I can at least admit that 2021 has been a career-restorative year for the director in other ways.  His new straight-to-Netflix zombie epic (everything he makes is a dialed-to-11 epic) isn’t exactly a whiplash-inducing return to form after the exhaustion of Snyder Cut discourse, but it’s still a charmingly goofy, mildly entertaining follow-up.  I’ll take it.  Army of the Dead is easily Zack Snyder’s most enjoyable movie since his Romero-homage debut Dawn of the Dead (penned by James Gunn, who turned out to be the more talented voice in the room), by which I mean it’s Passably Okay.  It appears that the zombie flick is the only appropriate fit for Snyder’s obnoxious blatancy, from his boneheadedly literal soundtrack cues to his exhausting emphasis on every single scene as the most Epic, all-important moment ever.  Army of the Dead surely would’ve landed with more impact and novelty in the nu-metal aughts, when Snyder’s previous action-horror felt like a breath of fresh air.  It’s starting to become adorable that he’s somehow still stuck in that long-putrid era, though.  He’s been hacking away at the same dirtbag Godsmack aesthetic for so long that it’s pushed past tacky to become full-on kitsch.  I understand the temptation to reclaim him as a misunderstood genius in that context, if not only because it’s a funny gag.  In practice, though, his movies are way too draining to be worth the small flashes of enjoyment you can glean from them, even when they’re Passably Okay overall.

Dave Bautista stars as a superhuman burgerflipper who has survived the zombie apocalypse by laying low working the grill at a greasy diner.  He’s approached by a shady casino owner who hires him to break into the quarantined city of Las Vegas and recover an abandoned vault full of untraceable cash, guarded only by hordes of cannibal corpses roaming the otherwise empty streets & gambling halls.  From there the movie is a blend of militant zombie-shooting action horror and a self-amused heist film.  As those two genres run in tandem, there’s all the assembling-the-team montages, first-person video game gore, disastrous getaways, and witty interpersonal banter (mostly notably delivered by Tig Notaro as the resident wiseass) fans of either side of the divide could hope for.  And then there’s more.  And then more.  And more.  Army of the Dead‘s 148min runtime is an outright war crime, dulling all its genre-blending, Vegas setting fun with at least an hour’s worth of superfluous material that should have been lopped off in the editing room.  Like 2004’s Dawn of the Dead, the film peaks during its opening credits, which squeezes in an entire zombie movie’s worth of exposition into a concise, bite-sized morsel of a montage (set to a Richard Cheese song, another Dawn of the Dead callback).  It’s the only part of the movie that could be considered concise, considering how unnecessarily weighed down and laborious everything that follows feels.  There’s a fun 90min movie buried somewhere in this macho, self-important excess, but Zack Snyder does not make those kinds of movies.  Pity.

If we can have a years-later Snyder Cut revision of Justice League, I think we also deserve an Un-Snydered cut of Army of the Dead.  I’m not saying we need to toss out all his unashamed meathead tendencies, where the initial zombie breakout is caused by roadhead and the years-later evolved zombies are referred to as “Alphas.”  Keep all the Gym Bro action horror you want, just make the damned thing zippier.  There’s a stripped down, streamlined, self-contained movie in here that absolutely rules, but you have to squint real hard through the Hoobastank fog to see it.  Snyder needs someone to push back on his All-Out Epic tendencies, especially when it comes to explaining each and every baby step in the plot.  Instead, like with The Snyder Cut, he’s allowed to turn the modern zombie movie into modern zombie television, something we’re all sick of after 29 seasons of The Walking Dead.  Army of the Dead is already greenlit to spin off multiple prequels and animated side plot series on Netflix, the same way The Snyder Cut reconfigured Justice League into a 4-hour made-for-TV miniseries.  That mode of literal-minded, plot-obsessed Epic filmmaking is not some vulgar stroke of auteurist genius in the modern media landscape.  It’s just how big-budget “movies” are made now in a post-MCU world.  At least this one has its moments.

-Brandon Ledet