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

Disclosure Day (2026)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Ramekins: Ramekin II (2021)

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Relic (2020)

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Across the Hall (2009)

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

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

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

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

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

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Maisie Goes to Reno (1944)

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In a somewhat baffling move, the makers of the Maisie film series decided, in the eighth of ten films and at the eleventh hour, to suddenly start paying some lip service to continuity between the comic outings of our beloved Maisie Ravier (Ann Sothern). When we last saw our heroine, she had joined the war effort as a riveter at Victory Air, and this film opens with her still in this job. Sweet Maisie has been burning the candle at both ends, continuing to work her swing shift while volunteering at the nursery to support the mothers working the day shift. Unfortunately for her (and to the comic delight of the audience), this has led her to develop a facial tic, causing her to wink frequently, usually at the most inopportune times. The doctor prescribes her two weeks paid vacation, and as luck would have it, an old friend is passing through on his way to Reno, where they could use a song and dance girl for a two week engagement at his hotel. Last time, we got to see just how far she would go to prevent a patriotic soldier from marrying the wrong woman. This time around, we get to see how willing she is to put herself in danger to stop a woman from divorcing the right patriotic soldier. Specifically, after buying the last plane ticket off of a woman who has rethought her Reno divorce, Maisie meets a young soldier named Bill Fullerton (Tom Drake), whose wife Gloria (Ava Gardner) has gone to Nevada under the mistaken belief that Bill married her for her vast family fortune, when the boy didn’t know anything about it until after the marriage. Maisie agrees to personally deliver a letter to Gloria, and sets out west for adventure (again). 

Shortly after arriving, Maisie meets this film’s love interest, “Flip” Hennahan (John Hodiak, who would star in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat the following year), a blackjack dealer at the hotel where they are both employed. Flip agrees to take Maisie to the ranch where Gloria Fullerton is staying, and although the reception Maisie meets there is cold, she feels satisfied in having done her duty. When she realizes she’s accidentally made off with Mrs. Fullerton’s matchbox, she asks to go back, but Flip admits that she can meet her basically any time, as the hotel’s manager is serving as the legal witness to Mrs. Fullerton’s residency for her divorce proceedings, and as such she comes to the hotel daily for lunch. Maisie’s quite taken with Flip’s willingness to sacrifice his gasoline rations on a frivolity just to spend the day with her, but the plot takes a turn when she recognizes “Gloria Fullerton” the next day. The woman in question is actually the real Gloria’s traitorous secretary Wini Ashbourne, who is in league with Gloria’s business manager Pelham (Paul Cavanagh, who previously played the largely absent patriarch in Maisie Was a Lady) to get Bill out of the picture so that they can embezzle Gloria out of house and home. To that end, they’ve employed master forger Clave, who’s staying across the hall from Maisie in the hotel. Rounding out the supporting cast is a truly charming performance by nascent choreographer (and future model for Disney’s Peter Pan) Roland Dupree, as a bellboy whose infatuation with Maisie leads him to play sidekick for her, even as she goes to increasingly extreme measures to stop the Fullertons from divorcing. Oh, and if you were worried about what happened to Breezy from Swing Shift Maisie, for once we also find out what happened to Maisie’s last boyfriend; specifically, “He got a little too interested in the native dancers … of Dallas.” 

This has all the hallmarks we’ve come to expect of a Maisie picture. Once again, her love interest is a man with a silly nickname (“Slim” in Maisie, “Skeets” in Ringside Maisie, “Hap” in Maisie Gets Her Man, and “Breezy” last time around). Maisie herself is brassy, funny, and occasionally pouty. She gets to do a big song and dance number, entitled “Panhandle Pete,” in which she pretends to make trick revolver shots and is pulled into and out of the performance area on a wheeled pony, to show off Ann Sothern’s talents at both. But there’s also some great novelty in this go-round as well. Flip is a different kind of love interest for Maisie, one that she’s interested in but doesn’t have to protect from the wiles of any other women, and Hodiak plays him as both quite taken with Maisie while also being frequently frustrated by her, and it’s a nice dynamic. He’s occasionally flustered by her endless questions, although “Are you married?” and “Are you a draft dodger?” are fairly reasonable ones to ask, all things considered. I was slightly disappointed that Swing Shift Maisie didn’t decide to go all in and have an espionage plot, but the filmmakers make up for that this time around. Although the scheme to defraud and embezzle Gloria isn’t exactly a spy thriller, it plays like one, so much so that when the three co-conspirators corner Maisie in her hotel room and hold her at gunpoint, it feels for the first time that Maisie is in real, actual danger. Pelham even slaps her across the face to shut her up, and I gasped aloud at this sudden intrusion of realistic violence into a series of films that, the potential starvation of the dust bowl migrants in Gold Rush Maisie aside, has had stakes about as high as an episode of my beloved I Love Lucy. 

The ending is high octane and slapstick in equal measure. Maisie has allowed Jerry the bellboy to come to believe that she’s working for the FBI after he catches her getting Clave drunk in order to get a confession out of him. Flip has become completely convinced that Maisie’s accusations of massive fraud and potential identity theft are the results of a breakdown; it’s patronizing, but the fact that Maisie was given leave from war work due to a nervous condition means that he has some decent grounds to believe that Maisie just needs help. With no evidence other than her word, Maisie enlists Jerry to help her kidnap Gloria from the courthouse before her divorce proceedings can begin, just to hold her long enough for Bill to arrive, as he’s finally been granted leave from the army, but won’t be in Reno until the afternoon. When they accidentally also abduct Wini, who was posing as Gloria to divert the paparazzi, all four of them are taken to the jailhouse by a traffic officer. There, Maisie must plead her case, while Flip arrives with a psychologist to try and convince the board to release Maisie into his care rather than be imprisoned. Maisie feigns a fainting spell and pretends to be completely out of it, which drops everyone’s guard long enough for her to escape custody, find Bill, and sprint to the courthouse to stop Gloria before it’s too late. In the end, they all end up locked in the judge’s chambers with dozens of looky-loos and court reporters trying to break the doors down. It’s terrific stuff, and I’m starting to feel a little disappointed that the end of the Maisie series is approaching, with only two features left. This one is definitely in the top three so far, and they’ve only gotten better as the movies have gone along. Nevertheless, the next time we see Maisie, the war will be over, and I can’t wait to see what our heroine is getting up to then. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Swing Shift Maisie (1943)

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We’ve met Maisie, seen her take a misguided detour on the Congo River, watched her riff on Grapes of Wrath and Knockout, get paired off with Red Skelton, and even be a proper lady. At last, in 1943, we get to see Maisie (Ann Sothern) join the war effort in a film that could alternately be titled Maisie the Riveter. We once again find our heroine at the foot of her Sisyphean mountain: broke, single, and working a lousy showbiz job. This time, she’s in a dog circus, although she gets let go from this when test pilot “Breezy” McLaughlin (James Craig) gets into an argument over the phone with his employer about Breezy’s voluntary enlistment in the air force. The repartee that follows Breezy and Maisie’s meet-cute leads her to decide she’s going to go get a job at Victory Air Co., declaring that “if [he] can fly planes, then brother [Maisie] can build ‘em.” 

Maisie hits a snag early on when she’s unable to present her birth certificate (“You can see I was born,” she says, “There’s not much doubt it was in Brooklyn”), but she convinces a man to perjure himself by swearing an affidavit that he’s known her all his life and can vouch for her citizenship. She also settles into a boarding house run by matronly Maw (Connie Gilchrist), where she meets former Abilene beauty queen Iris Reed (Jean Rogers) in the process of trying to suffocate herself with an open gas pipe after failing to find acting work. Maisie encourages Iris to get a job at Victory Air with her, and to leave her private room and share one with Maisie, to help her money stretch further. Iris agrees, and initially the two of them hit it off rather well, before Iris meets Breezy and begins to make designs to steal Maisie’s man. Before he’s sent out for training maneuvers, she’s succeeded, and the two of them confess to Maisie that they’re planning to wed. Maisie has no hard feelings, and even promises to look after Iris on Breezy’s behalf while he’s away, but this ends up proving more difficult than expected when it turns out Iris has no intention of remaining true to Breezy in his absence. 

Rogers plays Iris as a hell of a vamp, and having a true heel to play against makes for a very strong comedic outing this time around. Maisie’s attempts to keep Iris from wandering astray by trying to get her involved in several of the social clubs in the boarding house and the surrounding neighborhood make for a humorous, if not uproarious, montage. Iris has to be dragged away from the photography club because the teacher is a little too eager to take her into the darkroom for private instruction; Iris surreptitiously sneaks away from the lady’s singing club during a high note; Iris lies in order to leave a meeting of the virtuous wives and girlfriends’ club. When Maisie catches her in the last of these, Iris claims she’s simply going for more knitting wool, to which Maisie retorts, “To pull over whose eyes?” All of Maisie’s ministrations of morality come to naught, however. Iris’s consistent refusal to wear her safety scarf results in her hair getting caught in machinery, and when she explodes at the foreperson afterwards, she’s fired, but quickly accepts an offer from one of the men in the factory to let him pay for a room for her in his building. She makes sure to shake down Maisie one last time on the way out. 

When Maisie first talks to Iris about the factory job, there’s a bit of a to-do about Iris’s birth certificate, and at first I thought that this might be leading up to the revelation that Iris was a spy, which would have been a very bold direction for a Maisie picture to take. Instead, it comes back around in a different fashion, and puts Maisie in some of the worst real danger she’s been in. After a series of misunderstandings, including being caught slipping encouraging notes into the cockpits of planes she’s working on and being observed reuniting with some German expatriate acrobats of her acquaintance (and doing a poorly considered old routine with them), Iris decides to rid herself of the nuisance that is Maisie Ravier. When Breezy lets the girls know that he’s taking leave in order to come back and get married to Iris sooner than later, Iris throws up as many roadblocks between Maisie and Breezy as possible, including telling the authorities about Maisie’s forged affidavit letter in order to paint Maisie as an enemy infiltrator, which leads to her detention by the authorities. Maisie, caring more about making sure that Breezy doesn’t marry an unfaithful woman, falsely confesses to this in order to get the police to stop Breezy and Iris from leaving town by claiming that they are co-conspirators. 

I do think it would have been more fun if Iris had been a Nazi spy, but it’s still a blast to see Maisie with such a strong foil for once. Jean Rogers brings a bit of prestige to the piece, and her breathy, narcissistic performance as Iris is a delight. The elements of war pictures that you’re more likely to associate with the time—intrigue, pining women who long for the return of their brave soldiers, the duty of sacrifice—are pretty absent here. Instead, we get a bit of a propaganda piece about staying true to the men who are over there sticking blades in Nazi guts, with the audience of virtuous women seeing themselves represented on screen as steadfast and loyal, those who are too cowardly to break things off or are using the men for their own ends get to be told off by Maisie through an on-screen avatar, and our boys over there can rest assured that Maisie’s keeping their girls back home in line. It’s not as emotionally honest as, say, To Be or Not To Be or Trouble in Paradise, but it’s great to see Maisie really go toe-to-toe with someone who can hold their own against her. Definitely a top tier outing for our girl. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Leather Jacket Love Story (1998)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss David DeCoteau’s uncharacteristically sincere romance drama Leather Jacket Love Story (1998).

00:00 Spacecon
14:55 Masters of the Universe (2026)
22:31 Swing Shift Maisie (1943)
26:00 Maisie Goes to Reno (1944)
31:20 All the President’s Men (1976)
35:55 Ministry of Fear (1944)
40:31 Die Nibelungen – Kriemhild’s Revenge (1924)
45:40 Blades of the Guardians (2026)
50:30 Ramekin (2018)
58:07 The Doll (1962)
1:01:55 Across the Hall (2009)
1:08:15 The Currents (2026)
1:11:45 Relic (2020)
1:16:40 Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round (2026)

1:21:14 Leather Jacket Love Story (1998)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Maisie Gets Her Man (1942)

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May is getting far behind us, but in my heart, it’s still Maisie May. It’s once again time to check in with our favorite perpetually down-on-her-luck showgirl, Maisie Ravier. Not since Maisie has Ann Sothern shared equal billing with anyone (where she was, bizarrely, credited behind co-star Robert Young). This time, it’s presumably because her co-lead was an honest-to-goodness star. 

Maisie’s Sisyphean existence continues, in which she finds herself beginning every film in dire straits with no mention of her past loves or fortunes. This time, she’s the living target for a knife-throwing stage act, but when the great Professor Orco allows his recent break-up to influence how he feels about women and how careful he is with his act, nearly killing her, she once again finds herself pounding pavement. Maisie takes an offer from a man who operates a strange kind of boarding house. Like Gold Rush Maisie, Maisie Gets Her Man draws on then-current events, with a contemporary review of the film from The New York Times citing that the place Maisie finds herself is a “background that seems to have been suggested by A. J. Liebling’s Jollity Building series in the New Yorker.” (That A.J. Liebling was already writing pieces about boxing for the New Yorker which would eventually lead to the publication of The Sweet Science is also probably not a coincidence.) Pappy Goodring (Allen Jenkins) owns a building where he rents out office spaces, although many of them are also currently occupied by people who can’t afford real lodgings. Everyone there has fallen on hard times; basement cafe operator Jasper is hypervigilant about potential dining and dashing, Ears Coffin (Rags Ragland) is a former wrestler who has become a talent agent who couldn’t book St. Paul on TBN, and Pappy himself is staring down bankruptcy, in no small part because of his soft heart for his tenants and their hot checks. The operation gets a cash injection with the arrival of Marshall Denningham (Lloyd Corrigan), who has come to the city to market his new mineral water. 

You may have noticed that Red Skelton isn’t mentioned at all in that paragraph. Frankly, this movie would almost be better without him. Skelton plays Hap Hixby, a wannabe comedian who’s come to the city from the sticks to try and peddle his particular brand of annoying prop comedy. He and Maisie first meet each other in Ears Coffin’s office, and he’s extremely obnoxious right out of the gate. Maisie seems exasperated with him from the first scene that they share, which leads me to believe that he’s supposed to be unpleasant, but the comedy of that only works if a character is annoying to the other characters and funny to us in the audience, which Hap is decidedly not. Luckily, we only have to put up with this for a little while, since the first time that he actually goes on in front of an audience (with Maisie as his plant), he freezes with such stage fright that he drops most of his more exhausting bits for the rest of the film. After a bunch of rigmarole, Hap ends up as vice president of Denningham’s Sapphire River Tonic, and the success of the business means that Pappy is able to fend off the bankruptcy proceedings of his creditors, a process that is helped along by Maisie accidentally getting drunk with said creditor on Denningham’s Sparkling Tonic (which is just tap water and hard liquor) and giving him the old Maisie speech. 

She and Hap confess their love for one another, but the following morning, his fiance from back home arrives in Chicago, and Maisie once again leaves without saying goodbye. As with Maisie, she finds out later that her former beau has gotten himself into legal trouble, namely that Denningham’s con has been found out and that he had taken on Hap as his partner so that he could leave him behind to face the ramifications while he skipped town. Unlike last time this happened, however, she has a much more active role in the action. Having joined a traveling song and dance troupe, she finds Denningham in the midst of his next scam and is able to trick him into telling her all the details while she sends for the police. She next sees Hap when her group performs a USO-style revue at the camp where he’s enlisted, which is the first time that any of these films have alluded to WWII at all; she does a patriotic number entitled “Cooking with Gas,” and the end card encourages the audience to buy war bonds and stamps in that very theater. It’s a strange tonal dissonance that seems to come out of nowhere, but at least the music is lively and the film ends on an upbeat note. 

This film has some of my favorite Maisie-isms so far. When she manages to fend off an apoplectic Professor Orco, she commands the men who intervene to “Let him loose boys, so [she] can claim self-defense.” After Ringside Maisie’s lamentation asking what kind of stars must have been over Brooklyn when she was born, Maisie this time says that “They must have repealed the law of averages when [she] was born.” She’s able to really give it to Hap a few times, too, with my favorite line being “Go ahead and open it; they don’t mail summonses, honey.” Unfortunately, this does very little to counterbalance the extremely unfunny third of the film that features Red Skelton trying and failing to find the line between annoying to Maisie and annoying to the audience. As that aforementioned 1942 NYT review said it best: “Maisie, no doubt, will recover. She will dismiss her failure with a shrug, then brighten up for her next adventure. We like her, cheap tinsel and all. We hope she gets her break next time.”

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Ministry of Fear (1944)

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As we browsed our local video store last weekend, my friend and I were at the directors’ wall and I picked up Ministry of Fear, prompting my companion to tease me for being on such a Fritz Lang kick lately. I’m now decently familiar with his pre-Hollywood films, having seen (and loved) Metropolis, M, and Die Nibelungen, and I’ve seen some of his Hollywood noirs both pre-(Fury) and post-(The Blue Gardenia) WWII. I was curious what he was up to in the years leading up to and during the war, however, especially if he was doing any of the same kind of espionage thrillers that Alfred Hitchcock was churning out consistently, with his pre-war thrillers (The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Sabotage, and The Lady Vanishes) presaging the troubles to come, his wartime pictures (The Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur) highlighting the contemporary cost of war and the paranoia of the homefront, and his immediate post-war films (Notorious) dealing with the aftermath. Lang, perhaps because he was more personally affected by the war, didn’t deal with the subject very much at the time. His 1943 film Hangmen Also Die! was loosely based on the assassination of Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich, with his following feature in 1944, Ministry of Fear, being the only other time he touched on the subject, other than in post-war flick Cloak and Dagger, which echoes Notorious in that it follows someone tasked with finding Germans who have run to ground. 

Stephen Neale (Ray Milland) departs the Lembridge Asylum, where he has lived for some number of years. He makes his way to the train station, where the ticket clerk recommends he visit the village’s fundraising fête to kill time while waiting for passage to London. After entering the drawing to win a cake by guessing the exact weight, he goes to the fortune teller’s tent. Once he crosses the matronly Mrs. Bellane’s palm with silver, she gives him the ordinary spiel about love, but when he grows defensive about a past relationship, she instead tells him the precise weight of the cake, which he wins. Neale departs with the cake over the protests of a young man who arrives just as he’s leaving, and it’s clear that he was the one who was “supposed” to win. Just before the train to London leaves the station, Neale is joined by a blind man in his carriage. When he offers a piece of the cake to the man, he notices that he’s crumbling it instead of eating it, as if searching for something, but before he has much time to ponder this, the train stops due to a Nazi air raid, and the “blind” man makes off with the cake after beating Neale with his cane. Neale pursues him, and the man takes shelter in a derelict cabin to shoot back at him, only for the raid to blow the structure to pieces. 

Once he makes it to London, Neale engages private detective George Rennit (Erskine Sanford) to help him figure out who’s trying to kill him, and their investigation leads them back around to the Mothers of Free Nations, the charity that had organized the Lembridge fête. Neale meets siblings Willi (Carl Esmond) and Carla (Marjorie Reynolds, of Holiday Inn) Hilfe, who run the organization, and Willi agrees to help Neale make sense of things. To that end, they visit Mrs. Bellane, only to discover that, instead of the older woman Neale met in Lembridge, she’s a young, beautiful woman (Hillary Brooke, who appeared as one of the inconsiderate houseguests in Maisie Was a Lady). She invites them to attend the seance she’s hosting, and Neale meets fellow guest Dr. Forrester, a psychiatrist. The last person to arrive is the same man who tried to take the cake from Neale at the fête, and who is introduced as Mr. Cost. During the seance, a woman’s voice calls out, accusing Neale of killing her. Neale grows upset, and a shot rings out. When the lights come up, Dr. Forrester pronounces Cost dead, and suspicion falls upon Neale, who escapes. He attempts to reunite with Rennit at his office, but finds it ransacked. When another bombing forces him to take shelter with Carla, he explains the reason that he was institutionalized in Lembridge, and what it had to do with his wife’s death. With an unknown man (Percy Waram) tailing him everywhere he goes, presumably at the behest of the spy ring that has infiltrated the Mothers of Free Nations, he begins to fall for Carla, while remaining unsure where her allegiance lies. When he learns that Forrester has connections within the British government, he sets out to expose the league of spies before they can deliver intel about troop deployments to their German allies, but his veracity is challenged by his troubled past. 

Unfortunately, Ministry of Fear is little more than a knockoff Hitchcock, complete with a McGuffin, a wrongfully accused fugitive, a fight on a train, and a blonde love interest. In fact, one could easily mistake this for a Hitchcock film, were it not for the fact that the police in Ministry are shockingly competent. It has a few interesting things going for it, but it’s ultimately fairly run of the mill. This appears to have been a product of executive meddling, as reportedly neither Lang nor Graham Greene, who wrote the novel on which the film was based, were very happy with the final product. By opening with Neale being released from an asylum, rather than a prison, the film implies that he might have been there for reasons relating to his mental state, and there was a potentially rich narrative question about just how much we could trust our lead which could have been mined, but the film never chooses to go there. Some of Lang’s trademark visual flair comes through; the obliteration of Neale’s “blind” attacker by an air raid is a shocking site, and I was also particularly taken with a sequence in a tailor’s shop near the end that’s shot mostly in the reflection of a floor-to-ceiling mirror. The seance sequence is effectively spooky as well, and it was an inspired touch to have the only light in the final gunfight sequence be provided by the flash of muzzle fire. Alas, it’s not quite enough to propel this one to greatness, and I can really only recommend this to Lang completists and anyone curious about what his take on a Hitchcock style plot would be.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond