horror comedy

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

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

Podcast #272: Cramps! A Period Piece & BRUFF 2026

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Welcome to Episode #272 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon & James discuss the films they caught at the second annual Baton Rouge Underground Film Festival, starting with the menstrual creature feature Cramps! A Period Piece.

00:00 BRUFF
04:47 Cramps! A Period Piece
14:22 Public Access
28:04 The Knight
32:53 Pu Ekaw Tnod
35:21 West of Greatness
38:44 Unseen Olympiad

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

Popcorn (1991)

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The 1991 novelty slasher Popcorn has a fairly straightforward premise: What if William Castle was a serial killer? That setup makes for a much meaner, zanier William Castle homage than Joe Dante’s Matinee, one where Castle’s signature theatrical gimmicks get directly involved in increasingly silly kills instead of being deployed as mood-setting kitsch. The Stepfather‘s Jill Schoelen stars as a film school weirdo whose struggling department decides to raise production funds by hosting an all-night horror marathon in a traditional single-screen theater. They figure they can charge extra for tickets by bringing back the original theatrical gimmicks from the 1950s creature features they’re screening, like ziplining a giant mosquito prop over the audience during the atomic-age sci-fi parody Mosquito (an effect they call “Projectovision”, modeled after Castle’s “Emergo!” gimmick) or zapping the audience in their seats during key shocks of The Amazing Electrified Man (“Shockoscope”, modeled after Castle’s “Percepto!” gimmick). Only, a mysterious killer is loose in the theater and is picking off the film school students & staff one by one. The mosquito is rigged to crush an unsuspecting victim; the seat buzzers are cranked to lethally high voltage; the “Aromarama” gas deployed during The Stench is, of course, poisoned. While Schoelen’s softspoken auteur-to-be should be worried about what ridiculous retro-schlock gimmick is going to eventually be wielded against her, she’s instead perversely excited by the deaths’ potential as inspiration for her next screamplay, keeping the mood defiantly light despite all of the violence. Popcorn is a wonderfully silly 90s slasher with a wide range of imaginative kills and a fun all-night-party atmosphere, one that panders so shamelessly to its target audience that it’s an easy instant favorite for any genre-literate horror nerds.

Popcorn is pretty blatant about its William Castle homages, which range from the more obvious go-to references (like hiring a uniformed nurse to issue life insurance policies in the lobby, in case the audience dies of fright) to the deeper cuts (like its “Shock Clock” prop referencing the “Fright Break” countdown in Castle’s Homicidal). That’s what makes it so strange that Castle’s name isn’t mentioned once during the hours of bonus features on the film’s recent Synapse Blu-ray release. The retro horror parodies that fill out the movie theater’s all-night schlock marathon are referred to as broad homages to 1940s & 50s horror classics on the disc’s commentary track and in the accompanying feature-length “Making Of” documentary, without ever specifically mentioning Castle’s legendary gimmickry as an influence on the text. That concept-to-screen disconnect is likely a result of the film’s tortured history of authorship, with its final cut encompassing the work of three different directors working towards three different ends. The story goes that Popcorn‘s first hired director Alan Ormsby was really into shooting the 1950s creature feature parodies, at the expense of shooting the 1990s wraparound slasher that contains them. When he was fired from the project, Ormsby was drastically behind schedule but had delivered a group of highly detailed, reverential homages to vintage horror schlock. Producer Bob Clark (who had collaborated on Dead of Night with Ormsby, a friend he lost to that business decision) was reluctant to put his name on another horror project after becoming a more mainstream commercial director, so he hired one of his trusted actors from Porky‘s, Mark Herrier, to take the reins. Cast & crew have since confirmed that Clark essentially shadowdirected the picture, guiding a lot of Herrier’s day-to-day decisions and shooting substantial amounts of B-unit footage to get the project back on schedule. You can feel Clark’s influence throughout, especially in scenes where he voices threatening phone calls from the anonymous serial killer villain, just as he had in his breakout slasher Black Christmas. You can also feel the film’s divided authorship in how its obvious original intent as a William Castle homage has been lost in the handovers, like a game of telephone.

Luckily, the William Castle throwback gimmicks aren’t the only thing Popcorn has going on. The killer who weaponizes those gags is suspected to be a filmmaker of an entirely different era: a hippie freak who made ritualistic art films of the Kenneth Anger & Anton Lavey variety. Our hippie Satanist first appears to Jill Schoelen in a sweaty, Ken Russell-inspired nightmare sequence, calling out to her through the psychedelic afterlife. The second she wakes up, she starts scribbling details from that nightmare into her journal, insistent that it would make a great film. It turns out what she was dreaming was already a film, a scratchy 16mm short from the 1970s titled Possessor, which its director Lanyard Gates concluded by committing in-the-flesh murders during its climax at its premiere. Gates was apparently radicalized by audiences’ tepid reaction to his art films, deciding to get violent revenge on crowds who would rather watch goofy genre fluff instead of real, meaningful cinema. That hostile artist-audience dynamic continues from beyond the grave, when the film school’s all-night horror marathon is interrupted by a renegade screening of Possessor, which the captive crowd boos off the screen. The question of whether the long-dead Gates has supernaturally returned to this mortal plane to get his violent revenge on that audience or if his work is being continued by a more plausible, in-the-flesh suspect is answered in such a bizarre, spectacularly convoluted way that I wouldn’t dare spoil it here. What’s more important than who’s doing Gates’s work is what that work represents. Years before Wes Craven was interrogating horror audiences’ disconnection with the meaning behind their go-to genre’s violence & narrative tropes in New Nightmare & Scream, Clark & co. were already calling out the horror-hungry masses for not sincerely engaging with the art behind their entertainment. The art of cinema and the cheap thrills of horror gimmickry are directly opposed here, with open resentment expressed over how the former needs a little of the latter to earn its funding. That’s what makes reading Bob Clark’s authorship into the text its most satisfying angle, even if the truth is more of a three-way compromise.

Popcorn is not only disjointed in its directorial vision and its art-vs-schlock sentiments, but it’s also disjointed in its setting. The story is set in the suburbs of Smalltown, America, but the production was shot entirely in Kingston, Jamaica, making extensive use of an abandoned old-style movie theater located there. Some of the Jamaican touches to the production are subtly underplayed, like how the majority Black cast of extras are made to appear more diverse by wearing Halloween costumes to the horror marathon. Others are less subtle, like how this is the rare slasher that features an all-reggae soundtrack (including a movie-themed reggae parody of “Under the Boardwalk”). The illusion really breaks down when the power goes out during the marathon and a local reggae band is invited on stage to entertain the crowd by flashlight, turning the theatrical audience into a dancehall dance party. Like the rest of Popcorn‘s behind-the-scenes production anomalies, the chaotic relationship between its setting and its shooting location is just part of the fun. This is a pizza-and-beer VHS rental to be enjoyed with your nerdiest horror-loving friends, so you can all be poked fun at by a movie that doesn’t take you or your preferred genre seriously. As lovingly recreated as the vintage William Castle segments feel in Ormsby’s movies-within-the-movie vignettes, there’s something genuinely heartfelt in Clark’s overall hostility to the fun-loving, novelty-seeking horror audience who wouldn’t turn up or fund more serious art. If nothing else, Clark’s reluctance to put his name on the project betrays some kind of lingering, Gates-style resentment for the artistic limitations of the genre. He doesn’t let that professional bitterness get in the way of throwing a good party, though, just like he doesn’t sweat the logical details of how that party should be soundtracked.

-Brandon Ledet

Touch Me (2026)

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Touch Me had its Shudder premiere this week, and I went into it completely blind, which I recommend for anyone who is interested. This is a color-soaked fever dream of a movie, an erotic thriller wrapped in a science fiction plot that doesn’t shy away from turning a titillating moment into one of pure body horror, then following that up with a joke that underlines the tone without undercutting it. It’s fresh, fun, and something decidedly new, although it’s obviously not going to be for everyone. 

The film opens on a therapy session with Joey (Olivia Taylor Dudley) detailing an experience she had with a charismatic man five years earlier. She ran into him at two separate events wearing an out-of-place track suit, and mockingly (and correctly) dismissed him as an alien. When he revealed that this was true and that he came from another world devastated by climate change to save the earth from falling victim to the same fate, she allowed him to share his psychic touch with her, which had a euphoric effect that effectively combatted her psychological issues. She hasn’t seen him since a sexual encounter between the two of them turned into an assault when he wouldn’t stop despite her asking him to, running straight to the home of her gay best friend Craig (Jordan Gavaris), where she has remained ever since. For reasons that are revealed later, the two are able to live comfortably in Craig’s home, despite neither having a job, but when an unexpected and costly plumbing emergency occurs, Joey starts looking for work. This brings her back into contact with Brian (Lou Taylor Pucci), her alien ex, and she ultimately accepts his invitation for her and Craig to spend some time in his modern mansion in the hills. There’s some friction between the two and Brian’s human assistant Laura (Marlene Forte), but after a few sessions of alien group therapy, things are going well, until they suddenly aren’t. 

One of the barriers that I think some viewers will have with this one will come down to its playful zaniness. Touch Me isn’t trying to be taken at face value and as such calls attention to its filmic and fictional nature constantly. After Joey witnesses video evidence that there’s something more sinister going on than she’s been led to believe, the film shows us the backstory of the person she’s just seen die in a black and white segment; the victim was lured in via hookup app, with the telltale sounds of Grindr notifications going off but those messages appearing on screen like silent picture intertitles. It’s quirky, but not overly so. When Joey considers applying to work at the coffee shop she frequents, the “help wanted” sign on the counter appears and reappears in multiple floating bubbles that frame her face. It’s cartoonish, and the tone of the film supports it, but I can see a lot of the film-going audience growing frustrated with Touch Me because of this visual playfulness in a film that spends much of its time dealing with sexual assault and its psychological impacts. Those scenes are never played for laughs and are treated with appropriate weight, and we’re never subjected to it and only witness the victims recount them in therapeutic sessions, both legitimate and manipulative. That tonal whiplash is part of what makes the film special, however, and I don’t think that I would have it any other way.

Brian turns out to want “cross-species intercourse” with both of his hot young houseguests (and as many others as possible), and the film is very good at capturing what makes him both desirable and uncannily, repulsively inhuman. Pucci is an attractive man who has clearly put a lot of work into maintaining his physique, but he also has very impressive control over his facial muscles in a way that, in combination with his unnatural dark hair, allows him to look eerie and not entirely trustworthy. When characters are aroused by him, either through psychic manipulation or basic human lust, the film communicates this through erotic, almost pornographic close ups of his bouncing pectoral muscles or undulating abs, but then intersplices this with off-putting close-ups that feature his creepy stare and libido-shriveling Gary-Oldman-in-Bram Stoker’s Dracula grooming. It’s very effective at being both arousing and off-putting, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a film that captures that line so well. Both Taylor Dudley and Gavaris are familiar to me as a viewer who soaked up a lot of 2010s Vancouver-based genre television; the former portrayed divisive character Alice in The Magicians and the latter was the universally beloved Felix on Orphan Black. I was delighted to see both of them in this film, and they not only have great chemistry with one another but are also putting in performances that are so distinct that, despite having spent dozens of hours with them as their familiar-to-me characters, I never found myself slipping into thinking about Alice or Felix at all. Joey’s grief is completely different from Alice’s, as is her expression thereof; Craig is easier to differentiate from Felix since he doesn’t share that character’s accent, but Craig also lacks Felix’s motivation, integrity, and unrelenting self-love. When it comes to Gavaris, his dedication to picking up the weights as he aged out of his Orphan Black era twinkiness was a cause of some concern for me; I started following him on social media some years ago when he led a short-lived comedy series called The Lake in which Julia Stiles played his conniving step-sister, and the way that he would post about his workouts and the way he felt about his body was troubling. One hopes that he’s come to terms with that since then, and that Craig’s body dysmorphia here is him taking some agency over Gavaris’s own, since Craig calls himself “fat” and “hideous” despite being neither. 

Of course, it’s also an equally valid interpretation that Craig doesn’t actually think that he’s either of those things, and that it is instead his way of fishing for compliments from Joey. It’s a sign of their co-dependency; we eventually learn that they were both victims of childhood sexual assault, but that Joey has kept this from Craig, which has allowed for him to weaponize his victimhood against her in a way that she feels she can’t counter without either being forced to relitigate her trauma or risk her living situation. It’s not ideal for either of them, and demonstrates how this betrayal during their vulnerable years has led them to dismiss those traumas flippantly, through dismissive humor, or through total suppression, and this makes them easy prey for Brian. It’s good stuff, and although the film draws attention to its artificiality through overt stylism, it doesn’t feel the need to broadcast that it’s tackling “elevated” horror themes. 

I’ve had mixed feelings about a lot of the horror that’s come out this year. I was personally underwhelmed by Obsession because of the familiarity of its narrative structure, but I was also quite taken with Leviticus despite the fact that it traffics in images and ideas that are not necessarily novel either, just viewed through a new lens. Touch Me is fresh, irreverent, exciting, and sexy, despite also owing major debts in its visual inspiration to Neon Demon, Ex Machina, and Mandy. It won’t be for everyone, but will be thoroughly enjoyed by those for whom it does work. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Scary Movie (2026)

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

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

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

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

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

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Ramekins: Ramekin II (2021)

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round (2026)

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There’s a saturation point with overtly derivative horror movies where, if you make enough of them on a similar topic, they stop being treated as knockoffs and start being treated as a legitimate subgenre. Were there any dedicated fans of Bob Clark’s Black Christmas that initially brushed off John Carpenter’s Halloween as a copycat knockoff in 1978? Maybe, but dozens of Fridays the 13th later, they’re now both understood to be historic landmarks in the slasher subgenre, with little need to distinguish which arrived first. I’m sure the first couple body horrors of the 80s gore era were dismissed as shameless knockoffs by Cronenberg devotees, just as the found footage wave was first met with Blair Witchy skepticism and the giant-turtle creature feature Gamera was understood solely as a Godzilla copycat before there were other kaiju to compare it against. Likewise, when the killer-animatronics horrors Willys Wonderland and The Banana Splits Movie were first released a few years ago, they were initially understood to be shameless knockoffs of the popular Five Nights at Freddy’s video game series (albeit more successful movie adaptations of that series than its officially licensed ones). Since then, there have been enough Five Nights-riffing “What if the Chuck E. Cheese band tried to kill you?” variations that the subgenre has been legitimized with its own name: mascot horror. Write it down, commit it to memory; mascot horror is officially a thing.  There will likely be college courses about it at some point, so yes there will be a quiz.

Mere days after Casper Kelly’s “What if Barney was evil?” mascot horror Buddy screened at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, I saw an online advertisement for the straight-to-Screambox “What if Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood was evil?” mascot horror Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round, signaling to me that this newly coined subgenre is having a real moment. If I weren’t aware of Five Nights at Freddy’s or the previously mentioned mascot horrors that beat it to the big screen, I might’ve mistaken Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round as a rushed-to-market mockbuster of Kelly’s Sundance-premiered oddity. They are remarkably similar in narrative structure and production design, framing their mascots-gone-wild horror stories within the rules & rhythms of vintage children’s TV shows. For its part, Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round starts as a direct parody of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, with a kindly, sweatered TV host explaining simple concepts like mailboxes, welcome mats, and memories to the children at home. That last concept proves to be a sticking point for the poor TV host, who discovers that he has lost access to his own memories outisde the pocket universe where he’s stuck hanging out with sock-puppet animals on a fenced-in playground set made entirely out of cardboard. His chipper animal friends needle him about his lost memory in increasingly hostile, passive-aggressive ways until his concept of reality breaks down entirely, and he starts begging the audience through the camera to set him free from his play-pretend prison cell. Instead, his imaginary-friend playground adventure turns into a televised blood bath.

Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round suffers a lot of the same structural issues as Casper Kelly’s Buddy. Both movies are at their most compelling in the earliest stretch when they play as uncanny parodies of vintage children’s TV shows that are just slightly, menacingly off. Once that hyperartificial reality is broken and the ultraviolence starts in earnest, they become much more conventional horror stories, testing the audience’s patience as they meander towards their inevitable, genre-mandated conclusions. Admittedly, the highs are higher in Buddy, while Mr. Monkey‘s lows are much, much lower, which makes for a no-brainer choice if you’re only going to watch one mascot horror this year and skip the other. If there’s anything that makes Mr. Monkey worth a look it’s in the extremity of its ultraviolence, featuring lengthy, torturous scenes of surgical gore as our semi-demented TV host is strapped down to the titular merry-go-round and tormented by the sock-puppet avatars of his own subconscious. Once the mood lighting shifts from bright & bubbly children’s show cartoonery to dingy torture porn grit & grime, the novelty appeal of the picture falls apart, and it starts to resemble the mascot-adjacent slashers of the public-domainsploitation “Poohniverse.” I very much preferred hanging out with the dead-eyed, cheery puppets in their children’s playhouse before it becomes an adult flayhouse, when the scares are centered on odd details like Mr. Monkey‘s dirty human fingernails instead of maniacal screaming & disembowelings, which you can find in pretty much any horror subgenre. The most illuminating thing about the picture overall was how it makes apparent just how ahead of the curve pro wrestler Bray Wyatt’s Firefly Funhouse gimmick was on the current “mascot horror” trend, not to mention the even earlier genre prototype in Wonder Showzen, which predates Five Nights at Freddy’s by a full decade. In that long mascot-horror continuum there isn’t much room for Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round to stand out as anything special in particular, but it’s at least a convenient bite-sized appetizer of what Buddy will offer once it hits theaters later this year.

-Brandon Ledet

I Married a Vampire (1987)

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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 (Rachel Golden) 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 …

Two months earlier, Viola lands in not-New York (the end credits thank the city of Boston, but no notable landmarks of any kind are seen in any of her exploration montages) and is ready to start her life anew, far from Iowa. Unfortunately, she falls victim to all of the various swindles that eighties metropoles had to offer; she ends up in a disgusting apartment after getting swindled by a shady landlord, is robbed and grifted by her supposed poet neighbor Portia, gets stiffed for a heavy retainer by a lawyer who promises to help her get her money back from the landlord, gets pressured into giving up her last bit of savings to the cult of Muhammad Buddha Christ, and can only find work as a night cleaner for a man who sexually assaults her. All of this finally starts to change when her co-worker Olivia introduces Viola to her “brother” Robespiere [sic] (Brendan Hickey). Viola, to her credit, immediately cottons on to the fact that they’re vampires, but she later laughs off her suspicions as the result of too much beer and the lingering effects of a horror movie double feature. When she returns to Robespiere when she’s run out of options, she finds herself a new woman, charged with the confidence she needs to get her savings back from the grifters, and if they put up a fight, her new beau can take them out. 

There are some genuinely wonderful performances and sequences in I Married a Vampire, even if the film gets off to a sluggish start. Viola’s parents, Morris and Doris, are an interesting pair, since they’re both grumps who are blind to their poor parenting in different ways. Morris, for his part, is quite funny, while Doris’s haranguing of her wayward daughter is less fun. The script is pretty sharp from the get-go, and one gets the impression that writer/director Jay Raskin had a vision that he came close to fulfilling here, but was ultimately restrained by the budget provided him as a result of this being a Troma-level production. Once we get the framing device set-up out of the way, the actual narrative gets underway, and we get to meet a fantastic cast of awful characters. First, Viola encounters Mr. Gluttonshire, who tries to pick her up under the impression that she’s a sex worker. Then, she meets Mr. Keeper, the landlord who tells her that she won’t be able to find a place for $300 a month, but sets her up with an infested shoebox studio for $400… plus a finder’s fee and the deposit ($1000 total, or about $3300 in 2026), eating up a third of the money she worked hard to save for her move. When night falls, she learns that her unit abuts a loud rock venue that also fills her entire apartment with flashing lights. 

It’s in this sequence that we meet Portia (Temple Aaron), who all but steals the show. She’s exactly the kind of street-savvy gutter-dweller that you’ve met before, in the movies if nowhere else. She tells Viola that she’s a poet, and that she writes song lyrics for rock bands, and that she can get Viola a great deal on a stereo, only $50! She also explains that the reason they have no water is because they’re connected to the club next door, and they only have water pressure when there’s a good band (when the music is good, no one’s using the bar bathroom, so they’re not competing with the constant flushing for water), which happens every two or three months. Only someone as naive as Viola would be capable of falling for Portia’s obvious bullshit, but it’s charming in its way, and Portia is a tragic figure in her own right. I genuinely believed that she was going to end up on the business end of Robespiere’s fangs once Viola gets her understated revenge later, but she’s the only one who gets off relatively easy, as the vampire merely hypnotizes her to stop lying to and stealing from her friends. 

It’s here, in this circumvention of the expectation of how violent this will be, that this stands out for a Troma release. They’re never classy movies, and this one certainly isn’t that, but it demonstrates restraint in areas that other Troma-branded flicks don’t. It’s notable in the quiet, non-bloody, non-gory story resolution that Portia gets, but also in the understated nature of the revenge Robespiere enacts for Viola. You hear “Troma” and think that you’re going to get some geysers of blood or at least some viscera, but most of the violence occurs offscreen, with no gross-out bits at all. Even more shockingly, although Viola is violated by Mr. Gluttonshire, there’s no titillation factor and the film doesn’t use it as an excuse to force the lead actress’s top off. I’m not saying that the N.O.W. should be giving Jay Raskin an award or anything, but for a flick from the studio that brought you Stuff Stephanie in the Incinerator, it’s almost admirable. There’s no real violence, we don’t see any of it, and when it’s over, Viola is still fully clothed; it feels almost modest.

The romance between Viola and Robespiere is dreadfully dull, unfortunately, and the sequences wherein she goes to all of her antagonists and asks for her money back, is laughed at, and then gets her revenge via supernatural husband gets a little repetitive. The film runs out of steam once it stops being about all of the nasty urbanites who prey on naive farm girls and watching Viola tolerate it all like she’s the protagonist of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. Normally, the revenge portion of these films is supposed to be where all the fun happens, but I Married a Vampire is a little frontloaded with scuzzballs, which means that it doesn’t quite finish as strongly as it ought to, which is likely why it’s mostly forgotten. It’s still well worth checking out, however; just know you’re likely to get distracted in the back half. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Buddy (2026) & Adult Swimming at Overlook Film Fest

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One of the unofficial themes of this year’s Overlook Film Festival was the Adult Swimmification of the modern horror comedy, which has gradually emerged as a trend in the last decade of the genre’s furthest-most surreal outliers. Certainly, there have always been post-Tim and Eric, Adult Swim-style horror comedy oddities scattered throughout Overlook’s diverse programming, from the suburban soccer-mom meltdown Greener Grass to the gross-out Frankenstein riff Dead Lover to last year’s festival-wide spotlight on Kuso director Flying Lotus. This year’s Overlook had an even more pronounced Adult Swim presence than usual, though, not least of all due to the omnipresent ambassadorship of The People’s Joker herself, Vera Drew. Ostensibly flown out to participate in a panel about “Techno Horrors in the 21st Century,” Drew could be seen (and heard, thanks to her iconic Jokerfied laugh) at various movies throughout the weekend, taking just as much advantage of her festival pass as anyone else roaming the French Quarter shopping mall hub. The least surprising place to find her, of course, was a double feature of the two most Adult Swim-coded selections in the program, since her own aggressively surreal editing style has helped guide the rhythms of that particular genre niche in projects like Comedy Bang! Bang!, On Cinema at the Cinema, and the aforementioned People’s Joker. Spotting Vera Drew in line for this year’s absurdist horror comedy selections felt like a pre-emptive stamp of approval that we were in the exact right place, swimming with the adults in the horror-comedy deep end.

If any one title could claim to have earned its Adult Swim bona fides, it was Buddy, the debut feature from director Casper Kelly. Kelly first made a name for himself with 2014’s Adult Swim short Too Many Cooks, followed by more recent Adult Swim experiments in the weirdo-comedy block’s Yule Log series. Like those two previous attention-grabbers, Buddy starts as an eerily accurate parody of a long-dead television format, which Kelly then subverts by underlining its most uncanny qualities. After parodying 90s sitcom intros (in Too Many Cooks) and seasonal yule log screensavers (self-explanatory), his first feature begins as a retro episode of Barney & Friends, swapping out the friendly purple dinosaur for an orange unicorn named Buddy. There’s some incredible attention to detail in the cursed children’s TV show set decor, establishing a Pee-wee’s Playhouse style world where every piece of furniture is alive & costumed with googly eyes. Buddy rules over them all as a fascist tyrant, redirecting all attention & behavior from his various “friends” to focus on him at all times, all in the name of mandatory fun. Unfortunately, Kelly then breaks format while sketching about the basic rules of Buddy’s televised universe, leaving that colorful playhouse set for a much more mundane world outside its invisible barriers. When we’re trapped inside the Barney parody with an abusive dictator unicorn, Buddy easily lands all of its discomforting laughs & scares. When Kelly deviates from that format, it feels like a confession that this project should’ve just been another short, since the idea can’t fully sustain itself at feature length.

Simon Glassman’s own directorial debut Buffet Infinity demonstrates a much more admirably stubborn commitment to its own bit. Buffet Infinity tells a surprisingly legible Lovecraftian horror story through a series of local restaurant commercials for fictional businesses in Alberta, Canada. What starts as petty political attack ads between a local mom & pop sandwich shop and a corporate buffet chain quickly escalates into a town-wide hostile takeover, with an entire community swallowed whole by a single insatiable restaurant franchise. Its individual commercial parodies recall the awkward sub-professional sketch comedy of Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, edited together with the relentless intensity of an Everything is Terrible! mixtape. For all of its high-concept buffoonery, though, it still makes a fairly coherent point about how everything decent in the world is currently being devoured in some soulless corporate acquisition. All of the quaint hometown flavor of your neighborhood sandwich shop’s family-recipe “secret sauce” is being obliterated by grotesquely underpriced, overstuffed fast-food deals for meat-tower monstrosities with names like “The Beyond Comprehension Burger.” Buffet Infinity urges you to shop local, protect your loved ones, and take shelter until this soulless corporate takeover is all over.

I don’t think the full story of what Casper Kelly’s Buddy means in the current moment of post-Adult Swim absurdist comedy will be clear for some time. The film is still seeking a theatrical distributor after its mixed-reviews premiere at Sundance, and its public perception won’t fully solidify until it can be compared to the other upcoming Barney subversion, improbably reported to be written by Ayo Edrbiri and produced by Daniel Kaluuya. Meanwhile, Buffet Infinity is a self-contained, fully realized project with contracted distribution in the works from Yellow Veil, to be enjoyed by freaked-out stoners everywhere by the end of the year. Together, they made for a perfectly overwhelming double feature at this year’s Overlook, likely the strangest pairing I’ve seen at the fest since I watched Greener Grass back-to-back with Peter Strickland’s killer-dress anthology In Fabric in 2019. Praise be to the Overlook programmers for their longtime commitment to keeping the Adult Swim spirit alive at the festival, love & respect to Vera Drew for acting as that spirit’s living mascot at this year’s fest, good luck to Casper Kelly for finding his way out of his current distribution limbo, congratulations to Glassman, hail Satan, and all the rest.

-Brandon Ledet