horror

The End of Oak Street (2026)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

The best movies for kids are usually films that meet them where they’re at, movies which capture the feeling of childhood experientially and textually, and that tell a story that a child might imagine for themself. What if an alien were my best friend? What if my friends and I built a spaceship in our garage? What if I could enter a magical world by reading a book? What if I got shrunk to a tiny size in my backyard? What if an evil carnival came to town? What if I got taken by a UFO and came back eight years later? All of those were film plots from the 1980s; several were developed and distributed by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, while others were greenlit and produced by other companies that were seeking to capture the essence of what came to be known as “that Amblin feeling.” E.T. is the most memorable keystone for that entire genre, and the intervening decades have been spent trying to recapture it, with mixed success. One of the most obvious and blatant examples was J.J. Abrams’s Super 8 in 2011, which, despite technically being set in 1979, set the unfortunate trend going forward that all any media attempting to recapture the feeling of Amblin would get stuck as period pieces set in the eighties, and thus mostly end up recreating the texture of those films without the substance thereof, or understanding what made them special. 

Updating the narrative of Stephen King’s IT to be set in the 1980s and the 2010s instead of in the 1950s and the 1980s respectively is a logical choice, but one need look no further than the general public outcry about the downward spiral of Stranger Things and the fact that we’re now producing media about how an overly nostalgic generation has deprived contemporary youth of anything new to know that the well has been pulling up naught but dust for a while now.  As such, it’s a refreshing surprise that another film that is shameless in its evocation of the Amblin style, set (partially) in 1982, manages to pull off that feeling by just as shamelessly aping one of Spielberg’s biggest films of the 1990s, Jurassic Park. The End of Oak Street’s imaginary play catalyst is “What if my neighborhood got transported back to dinosaur times?”, which is as perfect a jumping off point as one could hope for in a film like this. Even the film’s eightiesness is understated. Other than a scene in which Audrey finds solace in Steve Winwood’s “Valerie” and another in which the opening credits for The Love Boat are playing on the family room TV, the predicament in which the Platts and their neighbors find themselves isn’t one that lends itself to the “Remember this?” pop culture references in which nostalgia slop normally traffics. I did appreciate that the art department stuck a Battlestar Galactica poster on Brian’s wall so that we would know his dog is named for Dirk Benedict rather than Herman Melville, but it’s reasonably subtle for this genre. 

The suburban Platt family is going through a rough patch. Patriarch Greg (Ewan McGregor) has recently been laid off and is keeping this a secret from his wife Denise (Anne Hathaway), who can sense that something is off and that he’s not being honest with her. At the very least, she’s frustrated with his inconsistency, like bailing on a promised family day at a neighborhood block party and undermining her by allowing their son Brian (Christian Convery) to bring his disruptive Blue Heeler, Starbuck, to the cookout. The family’s precarious monetary situation is already somewhat known to daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella), a budding astronomer who longs to go to Cornell and study under Carl Sagan (relatable) but knows that her family can’t afford it. For his part, Brian is entering puberty and beginning to show signs of adolescent rebellion and is hiding from his parents that he was responsible for seriously injuring another boy in the neighborhood. Denise has a friendly relationship with elderly neighbor Mrs. Huddleston, who was the uncredited editor of her novelist husband, and the older woman has been giving Denise feedback on a manuscript that she’s been writing, through which Denise is working out her mixed feelings about her life as a suburban mother. All of this familiar domestic malaise is interrupted by bizarre phenomena, like the inexplicable presence of a plant that’s been extinct for millennia in Mrs. Huddleston’s yard, or the sudden appearance of a mound of animal dung in the yard of the Platts’ hostile neighbor Mel (P.J. Byrnes). It isn’t long before the family is awoken one night by thunderous noises and blinding lights and discover that everything within a one-mile radius of the center of their neighborhood has been moved to 200 million years in the past, and the area is being infiltrated by the hungry megafauna of yesteryear. Can their family survive this crisis? 

There are many things that are flawed about The End of Oak Street. The dialogue is frequently cheesy and often outright treacly; Anne Hathaway continues to prove that she has a generational talent for interpreting some of the hokiest lines imaginable with genuine pathos (see also: Interstellar). Several sequences in which the family talks about their situation feature increasingly unhinged framing choices that make extensive, inexplicable use of split diopters for no thematic reason that I can comprehend. There are editing choices that are likewise baffling. In an early scene in which Denise and Mrs. Huddleston are discussing the former’s writing, their conversation plays out with one character occupying the left third of the frame while the other two-thirds are filled with a bay window that looks out over the block party festivities, with hard cuts to an inverted ratio of the right third of the frame containing the party who’s speaking while the left-two thirds is taken up by the window. If what is being communicated thematically is that Denise sees a potential reflection of herself in Mrs. Huddleston, a woman who subsumed her life into caring for a man who expressed no gratitude, then that’s a shot that’s begging to be framed symmetrically with the women mirroring one another. If that’s not what’s being communicated cinematically, then why not take advantage of the talent and throw in some shot/reverse-shot close-ups to break it up? I also didn’t quite love the technobabble explanation for their general predicament, but it’s a necessary evil and is decently actualized from a visual effects standpoint. 

The film’s most glaring flaw, overall and narratively, is that it never lands on a solid understanding of who its audience is. I mentioned a lot of eighties kid flicks up at the top, but it’s worth noting that The End of Oak Street is not suitable for children despite the childlike imagination inherent in its premise. In some ways, this film bears a strong resemblance to nineties classic Jumanji, but the violence there is mostly fantastic in nature; you might see a child forcibly turned into a monkeyboy or be bloodlessly sedated by a mean-looking barbed plant, but you’re not going to see that film’s animals feeding on the viscera of corpses or a blood-stained roof where a neighbor unsuccessfully challenged winged predators. The film, as also cited above, takes inspiration from Jurassic Park, but the dino violence of that movie almost feels quaint in comparison to the computer-generated gruesomeness of Oak Street, in which we witness dozens of people being ripped to shreds by prehistoric beasts, all while fleeing and screaming, first from fear and then from pain. It’s decidedly not for kids, and even a little extreme for a PG-13 film, but the film’s overly pat, sentimental ending also means that any child over thirteen is going to find it corny. 

Although the script’s dialogue is laughable, it adheres to the specific structural guidelines of screenplay instruction so precisely that it’s impossible to fault in its construction. Writer/director David Robert Mitchell (It Follows) knows this formula like the back of his hand, and he never overlooks a chance to let the rule of threes play out. It’s most noticeable with regards to Brian’s toy bow and arrow, which he attempts to use twice without success before managing to finally get a good shot in when his home threatens to become the new lair of a white worm. Both parents are realistically flawed; Greg’s hesitancy to tell his wife about his newfound unemployment comes from a place of patriarchal pride, but it also prevents her from being able to pitch in and help out by finding work herself before their financial straits become any more dire, while Denise has realistic conflicting emotions as a midlife stay-at-home mom to two children who are finding their independence. The conflict arises from their lack of communication without either being a villain; the film mostly lacks one, other than the neighbor who threatens to shoot Starbuck if the Platts don’t become more responsible pet owners. 

The thing about all of the film’s issues is: who cares? This is a movie about what it would be like if your neighborhood got sucked through a wormhole to the Jurassic period. You get a (semi) modern family encountering every kind of Mesozoic monster you can imagine: chicken-sized raptors capable of taking down a family pet, a Spinosaurus capable of knocking a car through a house, aerial reptiles that don’t take kindly to being shot at, horse-sized feathered bipeds that are surprisingly fast and always hungry, and the obligatory visit from the perennial favorite T. Rex. There are also beasts in this movie that I hadn’t even contemplated before, with the standout being some kind of albinic, amphibious, limbless tetrapod thing that made my skin crawl. The family dog reappears in the climax to fight off a Pteranodon! What more could one ask for, really?

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

#271: Sleepaway Camp II – Unhappy Campers (1988) & Summer Camp Slashers

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Welcome to Episode #270 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and Britnee discuss a grab bag of summer camp slashers, starting with Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988).

00:00 Welcome
02:30 The End of Oak Street (2026)
05:55 I Woke Up Early the Day I Died (1998)
09:11 Sequels of the Blind Dead
13:15 Popcorn (1991)
17:00 Nightborn (2026)

24:31 Sleepaway Camp II – Unhappy Campers (1988)
40:43 Madman (1981)
57:50 The Burning (1981)
1:09:00 Cheerleader Camp (1988)

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

Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Horror nerds have thoroughly mined every last golden nugget of vintage Italo horror schlock. We’ve already seen & celebrated every Bava, Argento, and Fulci worth a damn, and Vinegar Syndrome is now approaching its dozenth volume of “Forgotten Gialli” Blu-ray box sets, having scraped past the bottom of the barrel into the mud underneath. There’s nothing left. One solution to this new scarcity of hidden 70s & 80s Euro horror gems is to look instead to the contemporary genre cinema of Spain, which boasts all of the same stylistic & cultural points of interest as their Italian equivalents, just dubbed in a different out-of-sync language. For your next giallo fix, for instance, you can look to the sleazy Spanish murder mystery The Corruption of Chris Miller, and for your next late night zombi flick, you can explore the Tombs of the Blind Dead, a Spanish graveyard whatsit with multiple deliriously plotted sequels and a decidedly Fulcistic vibe. There were, in fact, other countries in Europe besides Italy making their own high-style, low-logic horror movies throughout the 1970s & 80s, and Spain is as good of a place to start digging as any.

The titular blind dead of this series are the decrepit remains of the medieval Knights Templar, who made a Monkey’s Paw deal with Satan during the Crusades to live forever without thinking through the continual, natural decay of their ancient bodies. They haunt the crumbling ruins of rural Spain, occasionally rising from their graves as sword-wielding Harryhausen skeletons. The main attraction of the Blind Dead series is watching these skeletal knights ride their ghostly horses in slow-motion, making a show of waving around their swords as if posing for a heavy metal album cover. In Tombs of the Blind Dead, their blindness is a result of their eyes having been pecked out by birds while hanging for their crimes against living locals, while in Return of the Blind Dead, their eyes were intentionally burned out of their skulls by those angry locals. In either case, they cyclically rise for revenge, searching for hot young hippie babes to sacrifice to Satan for further supernatural favors (by eating those babes’ beating hearts fresh out of their exposed chests). They’re total jerks who cause great harm to their neighbors, but they look really cool doing so.

Like in their zombi Italo equivalents, the scene-to-scene logic of the Blind Dead films don’t matter as much as their overall mood, which relies heavily on the temporal contrast between the medieval knights of Old Europe and the sexually liberated youth of contemporary modernity. In Tombs of the Blind Dead, the knights are awoken when a young bikinied hippie breaks away from an awkward beach vacation where she’s being hounded for sex by both her current boyfriend and a lesbian boarding school chum from her past. Once alone, she makes the mistake of enjoying a cigarette while listening to swanky jazz at the burial site of the Knights Templar and is cosmically punished for her moral crimes by being violently swarmed and then gently nibbled alive. Once free from their graves, the knights are seemingly able to roam freely, and the movie finds great novelty in having the ancient ghouls invade distinctly urban spaces like the local mannequin factory and the nearby city morgue. We’re eventually treated to a flashback to the living knights’ heyday sacrificing an earlier generation of hot babes to Satan during the Crusades, but those medieval tapestries are just a brief reprieve from the knights’ oddly modern hijinks.

Blind Dead mastermind Amando de Ossorio was apparently very proud of his staging of the knights’ initial rising from the grave, since that exact footage from the first film is repeated in the following year’s Return of the Blind Dead and then again in 1975’s Night of the Seagulls. As you can likely tell by that latter title, the knights take an unexpected nautical detour halfway into the series, which further confuses its internal narrative logic. Return of the Blind Dead is a straightforward repeat & escalation of the original, while its immediate follow-up The Ghost Galleon (1974) leaves the graveyard behind to set sail. You see, the undead knights are now anchored to a gigantic ghost ship that exists in an alternate nightmare dimension that can only crossover into ours through the conduit of cosmic fog. Once that ship inevitably sinks, they go underwater, emerging from a nearby beach in Night of the Seagulls to once again gently cannibalize buxom women’s beating hearts. Those women’s spirits then return to this mortal plane as seagulls so they can scream in pain, which the townfolk can distinguish from the cries of regular seagulls because regular seagulls cannot fly at night. It doesn’t make a lick of sense, but at least it’s poetic.

While the Knights Templar’s nautical side adventures in The Ghost Galleon & Night of the Seagulls sound wonderfully delirious on paper, Amando de Ossorio never again reached the artistic highs he achieved in the original Tombs of the Blind Dead. It’s impractical, but the blind dead really should be wielding swords on horseback in every picture regardless of whether they’re traveling by ghost ship. They’re severely less metal when they’re on-foot & swordless. The original film also has surprisingly surreal visual touches, like the intrusion of present-day train steam into the hippies’ boarding school flashbacks. Meanwhile, the most surreal aspect of Night of the Seagulls is how absurdly inept it is at the “day for night” illusion, completely disorienting its audience’s sense of time. Multiple scenes appear to take place both at midnight and at high-noon, simultaneously. The beachside locale is put to good use when local crabs are invited to join in on the knight’s oddly delicate flesh-eating, though, so it’s got its own minor points of visual interest here or there.

One way you can tell Tombs of the Blind Dead and its progressively ropy sequels belong to the same vintage Euro horror lineage as their Italo contemporaries is by puzzling through the confused history of their distribution. Upon initial release, they were each globally exported under different titles and different edits, with little care paid to artistic integrity or series continuity. Oddly, Tombs of the Blind Dead was rebranded for a US theatrical run as Revenge from Planet Ape, as if it were more directly inspired by Planet of the Apes than by the more obvious point of reference Night of the Living Dead. The Ghost Galleon was marketed as Horror of the Zombies, Ship of Zombies and, in Germany, The Ghost Ship of Swimming Corpses, while Night of the Seagulls was marketed as Don’t Go Out at Night and Night of the Death Cult, each title distancing these sequels from belonging to a larger Blind Dead franchise. Even within Spain, the “blind dead” became the “eyeless dead” in the series’ second outing, jumbling the brand. Nowadays, all four films are stuck between two extremely different modes of distribution: pristinely restored to their original form by boutique Blu-ray companies like Synapse, Vinegar Syndrome, and Shout Factory, or clumsily edited & dubbed as English-language bastardizations on Tubi, nothing inbetween. Movies don’t get much more vintage Italo horror than that.

-Brandon Ledet

Maniac Cop (1988)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

After venturing further into the neon-lit abyss of his own imagination with Her Private Hell (a self-referencing mashup of The Neon Demon & Only God Forgives), Nicolas Winding Refn is reportedly outsourcing pitches for his next planned project: a remake of the 1988 novelty slasher Maniac Cop. It’s easy to see the appeal. Like most of Refn’s work, Maniac Cop has a great look and a great hook but is in no rush to pay off the promise of its premise. Screenwriter Larry Cohen turns cops into the same abstract, high-concept source of terror as he would an inanimate object (like the killer yogurt in The Stuff and the killer ambulance in The Ambulance) or a prehistoric beast (like Quetzalcoatl in Q: The Winged Serpent and the voice of God in God Told Me To). Whereas Cohen’s It’s Alive asks, “What if there was a baby who was an ugly, homicidal maniac?”, his script for Maniac Cop asks, “What if there was a cop who was an ugly, homicidal maniac?” It’s a surprisingly effective venture since, as you know, all cops are ugly, homicidal maniacs, which makes its source of fear lastingly relatable. VHS era schlockteur James Glickenhaus (Shakedown, The Exterminator) offers some credibility to the film’s action cinema bona fides, and Blue Underground founder William Lustig does a cromulent job in the director’s chair making sure its visual style is up to snuff with other slicked-up slashers of its era. So why doesn’t it move? So much work went into the basic look, premise, and car-chase trailer clips of Maniac Cop that no one thought to put those individual pieces in motion in any convincing way. Its genre elements sit still onscreen purely to be admired, not to accomplish anything tangible or measurable, just like in a Nicolas Winding Refn film.

One reason for Maniac Cop‘s stubborn inertia is that there’s no clear, continuous lead character anchoring its narrative. For a while, Tom Atkins is heavily featured as a detective on the case of a mysterious series of randomized slayings, each attributed to an abnormally large, uniformed police officer. Richard “Shaft” Roundtree phones it in as Atkinson’s flagrantly corrupt higher-up, acting as the film’s extended celebrity cameo. An unusually subdued Bruce Campbell eventually steps in as the lead suspect in the case, a tall-enough cop who’s caught having an affair with a coworker just before his wife is violently murdered. Campbell is just one of many mutant freaks with badges working at his local station, and the movie continues character hopping until every butt-chinned cop who disgraces the screen is a credible suspect; every cop is a maniac until proven innocent. That investigation is mostly a distraction from the movie’s main mission, though, which is making high-concept horror tropes out of the everyday fear of being alone with an armed police officer. Despite its urban setting and all of its police-force paraphernalia, Maniac Cop is largely a by-the-books slasher, with a towering, undead killer stumbling from one slaying to the next in a series of isolated novelty set pieces. The initial shock of these killings is that the mutant cop is specifically targeting innocent people, committing random acts of violence simply because he has the authority to do so. A concerned citizen tells a TV news reporter, “I tell my kids, you see a cop, you cross to the other side of the street.” Another shoots a cop in the face after being pulled over in a routine traffic stop. The movie may not progress past that basic premise in a satisfying way, but it is shockingly honest about real-life cops’ fascistic relationship with the citizens they supposedly serve & protect.

Maniac Cop eventually has to deliver on its title by narrowing its field of potential suspects down to one specific maniacal police officer, no longer shielding his identity behind backlighting & shadowy silhouettes. The legend of the undead maniac Matthew Cordell is what roots this movie firmly in the slasher genre, in a naked attempt to establish a Jason Voorhees figure of its very own. Cordell wasn’t always a maniac. When alive, he played the mythical figure of the Good Cop on city streets, much to the annoyance of the Bad Cops on the force and the corrupt politicians in City Hall, whom he threatened to expose by being an uptight rule follower. As punishment, he was framed for fictional acts of police brutality and sentenced to prison, where he was promptly murdered by rabid criminals happy to kill any cop they could get their hands on. It’s upon resurrection that Cordell becomes a homicidal maniac himself, having been corrupted and mutated by an unjust legal system. He’s a ginormous, unignorable manifestation of all cops’ corruption & brutality, and he spends the first half of the movie representing all cops as one shadowy figure before his rotting, zombified face is revealed to the audience. Also like the Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, and Angela Bakers of slasher tradition, his original thematic purpose is immediately distorted & diluted in his return sequels. In Maniac Cop II, Matt Cordell joins forces with a local serial killer to seek personal revenge against the cops & prisoners who initially wronged him, no longer attacking random innocent citizens on city streets. In Maniac Cop III: Badge of Silence, he attacks sleazy TV journalists who sensationalize false accounts of police brutality for ratings, effectively letting cops off the hook for their everyday villainy by exposing it as fake news.

In the limited capacity that anyone discusses Maniac Cop in recent years, the film’s legacy has developed into a kind of Alien/Terminator situation, where its louder, flashier sequel Maniac Cop II gets praised as the best of its series for featuring more & better action scenes, while the original remains superior on a purely artistic level. And, like with Alien & Terminator, its sequels are so fun to watch you can’t even complain about it without sounding like a dweeb who doesn’t know how to party. Maniac Cop II is delightfully over-the-top, throwing as many car chases, chainsaws, strip routines, and explosions at the screen as it can in the name of VHS-warped entertainment. Maniac Cop III is a little more subdued at first, but it gradually builds to an elaborate high speed car chase where Matt Cordell is fully on fire for the final third of the runtime, driving a stolen cop car towards the proverbial gates of Hell. Both sequels feature extensive body burn stunts that are guaranteed to drop an audience’s jaws, while the audacity of the first film is purely conceptual. It’s extremely rare to find an American motion picture about daily police work that doesn’t make heroes out of monsters or at least excuse cops’ monstrous behavior as the work of a few bad apples. Even as a franchise, Maniac Cop can’t avoid backsliding into copaganda by its final outing, and its only clear, coherent commentary about the corruptive nature of the system can be found in the original Larry Cohen screenplay (despite the fact that Cohen also penned the sequels). There’s a good chance that Refn’s take on the material will return to the core, simple idea that everyday cops are terrifying alien monsters akin to a Jason Voorhees or a Michael Myers or Her Private Hell‘s The Leather Man. The longer he dwells on that point without distraction or relief, the better, but I guess an explosion or two wouldn’t hurt too much.

-Brandon Ledet

Saccharine (2026)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Saccharine is the latest supernatural horror film from Natalie Erika James, who previously directed Relic. Midori Francis stars as Hana, a queer medical student who struggles with her weight. While out one night with classmate Josie (Danielle Macdonald), Hana runs into her high school acquaintance Melissa (Annie Shapero), who was overweight in adolescence but has now slimmed down significantly. She offers Hana a couple of capsules of “Grey,” a new non-government-approved weight loss supplement that she says did wonders for her, although she warns her that the medication is extremely expensive. Hana, who has a crush on Alanya (Madeleine Madden), a personal trainer at the university gym, sees rapid progress in her weight loss journey after only one capsule, but when she learns that the price for Grey is five thousand dollars, she opens the second capsule and runs it through spectroanalysis, at which point she discovers that the miracle drug consists of human cremains. She sneaks back into the cadaver lab and retrieves some biowaste from her class group’s assigned corpse (cruelly nicknamed “Big Bertha” by one of her groupmates because of the dead woman’s obesity), cremates it, and begins taking it. By the time she realizes that in so doing she has made herself the object of haunting by Bertha’s restless (and hungry) ghost, it might be too late for her. 

There was some discourse last year with the sudden appearance of Ozempic/GLP-1s on the market as a weight loss medication, with many relating the too-good-to-be-true results of the treatment and the abject horror of seeing perfectly healthy celebrities and athletes appearing in advertisements for it to the 2024 film The Substance. The Substance is a film about a culture that prioritizes aesthetic conformity to a Eurocentric beauty standard upheld by a porn-addled populace over real “health,” pre-saging Ozempic, and is about the kind of world that creates the “need” for GLP-1s. Saccharine is a film that lives in the post-Ozempic world, a character study into a person whose lack of control over their binging episodes leads them to sacrifice their health in more ways than one in order to have the body that they want. It’s indirectly grappling with GLP-1s, but it’s also casting a wide enough net that its central metaphor can also easily be seen as a parallel to a fad diet or bulimia. It’s not exactly breaking new ground, but it’s also well-studied in the way that it treats the characters who struggle with their weight, often as the results of coping mechanisms and self-destructive habits that they have very little conscious control over. 

Saccharine’s greatest weakness is in its pacing. At 112 minutes in length, it moves pretty quickly in its first and final acts, but the middle tends to drag, with the scenes of Bertha-possessed-Hana eating in a fugue state beginning to feel redundant. The storytelling in Act I is very economical, giving us a lot of story visually without any of it feeling expository. We learn that Hana’s a med student, that she has a crush on Alanya, that she struggles with her weight, that she has a tendency to binge eat, that she’s a lesbian, and that she over-identifies with the morbidly obese corpse she and her classmates are tasked with dissecting (they even wear the same nail polish) — all within the first ten minutes of the film. But after the half-hour mark, the pace slows to a bit of a crawl. There is also a mostly well-done subplot about her parents’ marriage from which we infer a lot about Hana’s childhood. Her mother Kimie (Showko Showfukutei) is a typically overbearing mother whose parental concern takes the form of constantly monitoring her daughter’s weight and food intake and providing unwanted housekeeping; her father remains completely offscreen except as a shambling cryptid-like presence in the periphery, a shut-in who has grown too fat to leave the house. In the one real scene with him, Hana visits him while her mother is out of country (perhaps having left him for good) and lambasts him for “giving up” and the way that this affected his family. As a “the monster is the metaphor” horror film, this one comes a little too close to reaching Smile’s “oops, too obvious” territory in these scenes, and can be particularly frustrating at this point since the narrative seems to be spinning its wheels, but the final act manages to get the energy back on track to reach an interesting conclusion. The film’s unwieldy length results in an epilogue scene which follows the climax feeling less like a well-considered final rug-pull and more like a tacked-on extension, which wouldn’t be the case in a film that was ten minutes shorter. In a film with this subject matter, it’s hard to resist the urge to make a joke about trimming some of the fat around the middle, but it really would have helped the film overall. 

One of the things that I thoroughly enjoyed about Saccharine was that it also explores some largely uncovered ground by having its main character be a scientist, someone not only capable of finding out what’s in the miracle pills and replicating it but also who tackles her apparent haunting with scientific rigor; the film smartly explores this rigorousness as an almost pathological means for Hana to take some agency and control in her life, when she doesn’t have control over her body. That’s good stuff! One also initially gets the sense that Alanya will be more of an antagonistic presence: a hot, mean, physically attractive woman who will inevitably reject or otherwise hurt Hana. Instead, she becomes the film’s love interest, and she’s also both reasonable in her concerns that Hana is losing weight too quickly and compassionate about Hana’s compulsive night eating (which is actually Bertha acting through her, but Alanya can’t know that). I also really liked the relationship between Hana and her best friend Josie, who is a breath of fresh air every time that she appears. Although there are moments where her dialogue threatens to become a little too Afterschool Special, like when she tells Hana “You say ‘fat’ like it’s a bad word!”, she’s pretty well characterized throughout. Although the film wastes some time at other points, we don’t have to sit around waiting for Josie to believe Hana about the ghost that’s haunting her, since Bertha makes her presence known while Josie is there pretty immediately. All of that works, and works well. Perhaps most surprisingly, the film decides to suddenly become much funnier in the final act, which is a bit of tonal whiplash but which I appreciated, since it helped jump-start things again after the slothful midsection. 

This one is not quite as subtle or meaningful as Relic, and admittedly, I don’t think it’s trying to be. Moving away from the mostly single location setting of that film to the more varied environments of this one creates more opportunities for visual flourish. That’s mostly successful, as there are beautifully composed shots of triangular university stairwells and other fascinating images, and the more immediately apparent supernatural premise of this film means that we get to see some great ghost images early on. I also want to shout out the end credits, which are some of the coolest that I have seen in a long time. I’m not sure how I feel about some of the more regressive depictions of overeating, however. There are images of a mouth (presumably Hana’s) gorging in the opening, and many more throughout, and it feels very Shallow Hal to have the area around our lead actress’s mouth smeared with jelly and grease when she’s gorging herself during her “fat” period, slovenly and intentionally off-putting, then have her scarf just as much when she’s got her haunted metaphorical tapeworm taking the brunt of it in her “slimmed down” appearance. It’s not a deal-breaker, but it’s worth mentioning. All in all, this one isn’t quite as smart as some of the director’s previous work, but it’s making up for that by dialing up the style and expanding the scope of the lens. I look forward to her next one, and I hope it’s a little bit more concise.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Her Private Hell (2026)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Anytime I catch myself wondering “Where have they been?” about a specific actor or director, the answer is always television. Nicolas Winding Refn has produced two high-end TV series since he last graced cinemas with the best film of 2016, which from my limited perspective means he’s spent the last decade enjoying an early retirement. Then, out of nowhere, he premiered his new film Her Private Hell at this year’s Cannes, once again baffling & frustrating fans & critics alike with another slow-motion adventure into his own neon-lit subconscious. Her Private Hell presented an opportunity for a grand Refn comeback tour, dragging the acquired-taste auteur out of the hazy obscurity of luxury TV streaming series and back into the glamorous spotlight of festival-circuit red carpets. Instead, he chose to double down on the prickliest, most alienating aspects of his work with no apparent urge to gain new fans or win over old haters. It’s like the 50-something filmmaker skipped the middle period of his career so he could rush directly into his “late style” era. Imagine if Coppola had fucked off for ten years after making The Godfather and then immediately came back with Megalopolis, or if David Lynch had jumped straight into Inland Empire after Blue Velvet, without laying the decades of artistic & thematic groundwork that earns an audience’s trust & good will. Older, venerated filmmakers of that stature are given a lot of leeway to go big and go vague without guiding the audience along the way with the usual handholding tactics of Narrative, Structure, Entertainment, and Taste. There’s something extremely bratty about Refn acting as if he’s entitled to that same reverence & grace at such a relatively young age, and so long since he last pleased a crowd with his jacket-and-soundtrack-selling hit Drive. As always, I admire the audacity.

Structurally, Her Private Hell combines the two most alienating titles from Refn’s back catalog—The Neon Demon & Only God Forgives—into a crude, volatile mash-up where they never quite gel into a new singular work. Sophie Thatcher stars in the Neon Demon half, playing a jaded, sneering actress in a sci-fi dystopia who gets back at her emotionally checked-out father by sexually pursuing his wife (and her former bestie, played by Havana Rose Liu). Charles Melton headlines the Only God Forgives half, playing an American bruiser in post-WWII Tokyo, who’s willing to crush infinite skulls and suffer infinite tortures in his pursuit to get his daughter back from gangster kidnappers. How these two temporally dissonant stories are related is anyone’s guess; they share a thematic impulse to reunite broken families, but they’re otherwise rigidly segregated. Certain sequences of the edit suggest that Melton’s buff, shirtless soldier of a forgotten neon-noir past has been entirely dreamed up by Thatcher’s lonely, horny actress from our neon-melodrama future, as the story often shifts to his perspective at the exact moment that her head hits a pillow. More directly, they are connected by a mysterious mist that hangs heavy over both of their rotten cities, physicalizing the ambiguity of the temporal & geographical settings Refn sketches out here. Another figure who emerges from that mist is an entity known only as The Leather Man: a hulking presence dressed head to toe in black leather, studded with diamonds, who occasionally rips women’s chests open with his bare hands as if he’s spatchcocking a turkey. If the mist is a physical manifestation of the film’s ambiguity, The Leather Man is a physical manifestation of its dread – a walking, stalking avatar of Bad Vibes. All three of these central figures are really just isolated figments of Refn’s imagination, relegated to their own distinct movie realms, only accessed by dreams, only connected by mist.

While Her Private Hell mostly operates on post-giallo dream logic, it announces itself as a futuristic fairy tale with a wry Hans Christian Andersen name-drop in its very first scene. Instead of the usual driving synths that provide a sense of momentum in Refn’s otherwise static tableaus, this outing is scored by old-timer Pino Donaggio with the fluttering harps & strings that usually accompany bedtime fairy tales, marking the exact moment that a character falls asleep and drifts into a magical other-realm. Thatcher’s attention-starved protagonist makes that framing clear in her direct references to her love interest (and familial rival) as her “Wicked Stepmother,” while debating whether to fuck or kill her as retribution for the betrayal of marrying her father. If Her Private Hell is a bedtime storybook, though, it’s one that’s only suitable for overly patient perverts who’ve already flipped through all of the available Bertrand Mandico, Yann Gonzales, Jane Schoenbrun, Amanda Kramer, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani titles on the shelf and are looking to add one just more neon spotlight to their oncoming dream. When The Neon Demon first hit theaters a decade ago, there was a “What am I even looking at?” quality to it that has since faded as so many other, hungrier auteurs have made names for themselves playing Refn’s game. The diamond & leather studded killer and the characters who are named after punk icons like Johnny Thunders & Nico can’t help but recall Mandico’s work in particular, even if Refn was already doing his thing well before The Wild Boys. Appreciation of Her Private Hell requires an appreciation of all beautifully lit, eerily empty film genres, as exemplified by Thatcher & company seemingly working on a Planet of the Vampires remake in-between their semi-incestuous sexual rivalries and inert fashion magazine editorials, adding 60s sci-fi kitsch to the already sky-high pile of retro genre references. Refn is in some ways very giving here, offering the audience a whole lot of everything while, paradoxically, lulling us to sleep with a cold, mystifying sparseness. Everything he loves is carefully arranged on the screen but rarely set in motion, with little care for whether there’s an audience out there who loves him back.

-Brandon Ledet

Au Revoir, Godzilla, Mon Amour

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

It’s been three years since Criterion’s towering box set of Shōwa era Godzilla films arrived on my doorstep, and I’ve been madly in love ever since. Anytime I’m unsure what movie to watch, I’ll toss on a Godzilla disc to pass the time, the same way an old Beatles record is always there for me whenever I’m indecisive on what to listen to. It’s been lovely, but all affairs eventually run their course, and I’ve officially run out of new-to-me Godzilla movies to watch in that 15-film set. I recently ran through my last two remaining Godzilla titles in rapid succession—1972’s Godzilla vs. Gigan and 1975’s Terror of Mechagodzilla—and found that the romantic spark was still very much alive. Together, they reminded me of two entirely different reasons why I first fell in love with my giant lizard friend, and why it’s so sad I’ll now only be able to revisit that loving feeling in nostalgic rewatches instead of experiencing the seductive rush of a brand-new romance. Of course, the Criterion box set only accounts for half of Godzilla’s ginormous cinematic footprint, and there’s plenty other movies left out there to discover, but I’m still granting myself a little space here to mourn the end of my relationship with the atomic monster’s original run from the 1950s to the 1970s.

By the time Godzilla faced off against Gigan in the early 1970s, he had already fully transformed from harrowing nuclear fallout metaphor to superhero protector of children everywhere. Much of the back half of Godzilla’s Shōwa era finds the skyscraper kaiju beast mugging for the kids in the cheap seats while performing pro wrestling moves on his fellow rubber-suited monsters. In the case of Godzilla vs. Gigan, that means facing off against an especially goofy looking combatant: a cycloptic mechachicken with a whirring buzzsaw in its belly, the creature-design equivalent of when Homer Simpson designed his ideal car. There’s nothing especially novel about the film’s plot, which is yet another alien-invasion story among many in the set, with recycled footage from previous monster attacks and recycled grumblings about how pollution has turned Earth into “a toxic world, a radioactive wasteland.” Still, though, the latter kiddie-fluff Godzilla pics can often surprise you with a novelty in style, in this case a comic book-inspired sensibility that makes the formula feel fresh again. The monster attacks are centered around an amusement park that features a Godzilla-shaped observation tower, and the alien invasion plot (involving cockroach humanoids from another planet) is uncovered by a manga artist who exclusively pitches kid-friendly monster designs like “The Homework Monster” and “The Strict Mom Monster”. That’s not to say that the kaiju action can’t get brutally violent; the climactic fight between Godzilla & Gigan is staged in an exploding oil refinery field and feels like a vision of Hell, leaving Godzilla visibly bleeding onscreen for the first time in the franchise. It’s just that the pronounced comic book sensibility leads to its biggest surprises in terms of novelty. When Godzilla starts chatting to his giant pet armadillo Anguirus in comic-panel speech bubbles, it feels like there are still endless possibilities for what this series can do, despite this entry relying so heavily on pre-existing images the audience has already seen before.

As much fun as the alien cockroaches and comic book speech bubbles of Godzilla vs. Gigan can be, I’m glad that the series toned down its kid-friendly hijinks for its final entry (before the monster’s return in the 80-90s Heisei era), Terror vs. Mechagodzilla. Original Godzilla director Ishirō Honda returned to conclude the Shōwa era on a serious note, keeping all of the space alien invaders and remote-controlled kaiju puppets that had crept into the go-to formula over the years but deciding to play them straight instead of goofy. The opening credits play out over a “Previously on . . .” recap of Godzilla’s first tussle with his “space-titanium” doppelganger Mechagodzilla, then the humans-on-the-ground plot introduces a new combatant to the ring in the underwater dinosaur creature Titanosaurus. Earth is once again characterized as a “polluted & chaotic” nuclear wasteland primed for takeover from mad scientists & alien invaders, but those stock villains’ lives are given more room to develop dramatic tension in this go-round. When the human hero holds the mad scientist’s robot daughter’s dying body in his arms and declares, “You may be a cyborg, but I still love you,” the emotions of the moment actually mean something, against all odds. Ishirō Honda seemed stubbornly determined to reclaim the Godzilla series as more than just kiddie stuff here, aging up the onscreen action with more Godzilla blood in the kaiju battles and cyborg nudity in the sci-fi machinations of the humans-on-the-ground subplot. He even manages to make the recycling of previous Godzilla films’ footage surprisingly elegant, playing highlights from previous monster attacks back in a 4-way splitscreen layout. Honda’s sincerity continually made for Godzilla’s most compelling non-kaiju drama in the monster’s original run, to the point where you forget he also directed a couple of the monster’s silliest, flimsiest outings (namely King Kong vs. Godzilla and All Monsters Attack). The Shōwa era started with Honda’s national heartbreaker Godzilla (1954), and it ended with the director reasserting that the increasingly goofy series still has a beating heart at its core.

Godzilla vs. Gigan was stunt actor Haruo Nakajima’s twelfth & final outing playing Godzilla onscreen, and Terror of Mechagodzilla was Ishirō Honda’s ninth & final Godzilla film as director. Together, they rounded out my personal years-long romance with the 8-disc, 15-film Criterion box set, which only helped underline the finality of Nakajima & Honda’s contributions to the series. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with classic, first-run Godzilla, to the point where I’m questioning whether I was ever properly critical or analytical about any individual entries in the series. When a Godzilla movie isn’t especially great, I’m still always grateful to spend more time with my good friend Godzilla, even having written lengthy apologia about his off-brand American outings. So, when you catch me saying glowing things about Adam Wingard’s King Kong crossovers, Criterion’s new restoration of Godzilla vs. Biollante, or the upcoming Reiwa era update Godzilla Minus Zero, please know that I am grading on a curve because I have nothing but love for Godzilla in my heart. Still, I feel compelled to recap my time spent with the Shōwa era box set by ranking the included films and linking to our reviews across a half-decade of website posts, despite the fact that I love them all and I’m sad to realize that our time together is over.

  1. Godzilla (1954)
  2. Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971)
  3. Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964)
  4. Destroy All Monsters (1966)
  5. Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964)
  6. Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975)
  7. King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962)
  8. Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966)
  9. Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1974)
  10. Invasion of the Astro-Monster (1965)
  11. Godzilla vs. Gigan (1972)
  12. Son of Godzilla (1967)
  13. Godzilla vs. Megalon (1973)
  14. All Monsters Attack (1969)
  15. Godzilla Raids Again (1955)

-Brandon Ledet

The Doll (Vaxdockan, 1962)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before: A lanky loner who works late nights and has uneasy relationships with women lives alone in an upstairs attic with an empty rocking chair, muttering increasingly disconcerting, violent things to an imagined woman who isn’t really there. Psycho was on my mind during the entire runtime of Arne Mattsson’s The Doll, which was produced in Sweden just two years after Alfred Hitchcock’s genre-defining masterwork. And yet, none of the film’s prominent critical commentary mentions Hitchcock by name, instead likening The Doll to the more sophisticated national cinema of Ingmar Bergman. Personally, I can’t read The Doll as anything other than an attempt to class up Psycho for an international arthouse crowd. It’s less of a direct photocopy than it is a cross-cultural echo, altered enough through translation that it gradually becomes its own distinct art piece. If nothing else, in the process of swapping out Norman Bates’s maternal corpse for a sexy department store mannequin it pushes past Hitchcock knockoff territory to explore new psychosexual genre textures, accidentally inventing Peter Strickland’s fetish-horror cinema in the process.

Our troubled antihero is a self-pitying sad sack who moans & groans about the loneliness of everyday city life. He spends countless hours staring at the water stains on his apartment ceiling, daydreaming about his ideal romantic partner instead of actually, you know, talking & relating to the women around him. The incel loser then strikes gold while working a shift at his nightwatchman job, discovering a department store mannequin that looks exactly like the ideal woman he’s been picturing in his head: a near-featureless object with a blunt brunette bob. He steals her away from his post, blames her absence on a robbery, and relocates her to the squeaky mattress in his bachelor pad. There, he keeps the plastic woman as a kind of domestic prisoner, pouring his heart out to her as the first woman to ever fully understand his peculiar persona . . . since she’s an inanimate object he can control through his own imagination. The longer he spends time alone with the mannequin, however, the more of her own self-determined personality & autonomy starts to emerge, and her captor once again struggles to reckon with the idea that women are people with their own wants & needs, not possessions to dress up & neatly store like dolls.

Once The Doll finds its unlikely man & mannequin couple locked away in a single-room attic apartment, it becomes a kind of volatile stage play about gendered domestic squabbles. Although the incel nightwatchman does commit violent acts as these one-sided arguments escalate, it’s less a horror of action than it is a horror of the uncanny. As he starts to fully believe in the personhood of the mannequin, she subtly comes to life; she laughs, she cries, she dances, she writhes. At first, she lays still while Mattsson’s camera handles all the movement, indicating her emotional state through a sweeping pan around her prison bed. Then, her mannequin body is periodically replaced by the real-life flesh of actress Gio Petré, who’s outfitted with the same bob wig and feature-flattening makeup. The mannequin figure alternates seamlessly between Petre’s body and its artificial surrogate, so that many shots leave the audience questioning which is which. This dynamic gives actor Per Oscarsson a fellow onscreen player to bounce the protagonist’s misogynist ideology off of, so that he’s not entirely acting opposite a doll, but it also provides the majority of the film’s horror-cinema chills.

Despite its potential framing as a rushed-to-market Psycho knockoff, The Doll is a beautiful art object in its own right. Mattsson lights his players with the harsh low-angle flashlight spotlight of a crime scene, establishing an Old Dark House vibe in what’s otherwise a fairly mundane apartment building. He also frequently finds aesthetically beautiful ways to accentuate the uncanny nature of the titular doll’s body, such as the Buñuelian image of her severed hand resting on the apartment’s basement stairs, or a rose gently resting on that same upturned palm once it’s reattached to the mannequin’s arm. Petre consistently contorts her hands to match the mannequin’s pose in her scenes, and she finds a way to appear distant & glassy eyed even in her fiercest arguments with Oscarsson’s disturbed lead. For a sexually sordid horror picture with a creepy children’s theme song about “a grown man who plays with dolls,” it’s a remarkably classy affair, one that earns its Bergman comparisons in its lengthy, vicious war-of-the-sexes dialogue exchanges. If you want the trashier, campier version of this movie, check out Peter Strickland’s In Fabric or the German whatsit The Berlin Bride. This one’s for the artsy-fartsy horror crowd, the elite pervert aesthetes.

-Brandon Ledet

Touch Me (2026)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

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)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

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