reviews

I Married a Vampire (1987)

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Crash (1996)

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The first three scenes in David Cronenberg’s Crash are sex scenes. The fourth is a car crash. That, too, turns out to be a form of sex, but it takes a minute for the audience to catch up. We’re introduced to our central couple in peril as they’re having polyamorous sex with other partners, then meet to discuss their extramarital adventures while having sex with each other. In each case, they are in direct contact with heavy machinery, which adds to their excitement. In the first scene, a woman (Deborah Unger) has sex with her flight instructor while her cheek is pressed against the wing of the small airplane she’s learning to pilot. Next, we see her film-producer husband (James Spader) having sex with an assistant camera operator while using the tools of their trade as a makeshift mattress. Then, the married couple convenes on their high-rise balcony, overlooking a dozen lanes of endless traffic as they have semi-public sex in shameless view of the passing cars below, getting off on the exposure of their bodies and their recounted affairs. In the fourth scene and first car crash (of many), the machinery becomes more actively involved in the physical contact. The film producer drives head-on into another car, instantly killing its driver. That victim’s widow (Holly Hunter) then sensually reveals her naked breast to our battered & concussed protagonist, revealing that his highway accident was, indeed, another form of sex. He just doesn’t know it yet.

While its small cult of automotive fetishists has fixated on a highly specific turn on, Crash is the ultimate “Anything can be sex!” movie. Car crashes? That’s public sex. Kissing a freshly inked tattoo? Oral sex. Lighting a friend’s cigarette? That’s making love. Photographing a concussed hospital patient? Okay, that’s more akin to pornography & masturbation, but you get the point. James Spader’s car-horny protagonist awakes from his first crash half-alive in a hospital bed, where he’s already been scouted & recruited by the sex cult’s egomaniacal leader (Elias Koteas). The cult’s biggest outreach program appears to be a regular outdoor meeting where they recreate famous car crashes—like the one that killed James Dean—for bleachers packed with horny voyeurs. Their leader doesn’t restrict his sexual releases to those grand displays, however. His gigantic, beat-up car is both a battering ram and “a bed on wheels,” which he swerves up and down the streets of Toronto in search of the ultimate car-crash turn-on: death. His loyal followers all fuck & mutually masturbate each other in various pansexual pairings one car crash after another, until the movie arbitrarily ends during one such indulgence, no actual end to their nihilistic highway hedonism in sight. Functionally, every scene is a sex scene, and yet it seems as if the only players who achieve orgasm are the ones who die in their respective crashes, crushed under heavy metal.

It’s typical for David Cronenberg movies to be about sex, but Crash differs from his usual mode by actually depicting it. Usually, Cronenberg depicts the penetration and joining of the human body’s various orifices a kind of monstrous real-time mutation, something to fear rather than enjoy. Although a lot of Crash‘s sexual touch is mediated through heavy machinery, Cronenberg also includes plenty of direct skin-on-skin contact, embracing the erotic instead of recoiling from it. While he preserves the protagonist’s name as James Ballard—in reference to the sci-fi novelist who wrote the source material—he shifts the character’s occupation to Torontonian film producer, even depicting him slumped in a director’s chair on set. In this way, Spader plays both the author and the auteur, intertwining Cronenberg’s personal sexual hang-ups with Ballard’s cerebral perversion of daily highway driving. In the film’s best moments, he gets totally lost in the abstract hedonism of cars’ physical presence, such as the wet thudding sounds of an automated car wash or the philosophical meaning behind traffic’s ebb & flow currents. It’s all slyly funny, chillingly violent, incredibly sexy, and seemingly personal to how both of its respective authors think about sex & modernity. So, yes, anything can be sex, including a deadly car crash. How terribly exciting is that?

-Brandon Ledet

Miroirs No. 3 (2026)

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What’s so wrong about a little parasocial bonding, as long as you keep it friendly? That’s the question at the heart of Christian Petzold’s latest understated arthouse thriller, which feels remarkably minor even by his standards. Miroirs No. 3 continues Petzold’s ongoing collaboration with actress Paula Beer, who’s been working as his go-to muse since Undine at the start of the decade. Beer stars as a lonely woman at the outskirts of the music industry, alienated by the careerist ambitions of her boyfriend and the sycophantic obligations of making connections with other go-getter urbanites. While on a weekend getaway in the German countryside, the uneasy couple get into a gnarly car accident, leaving Beer’s aspiring pianist concussed, alone, and presumably in mourning. She’s then taken in by a rural family who appear to be generous in providing her a bed to recover in but eventually prove to have their own selfish motivations in the supposed charity act. As she pieces her life back together in the days after the accident, it becomes clear that she’s being modeled to fulfil a domestic role in the home left vacant by another woman her own age, and she’s unwittingly become an integral part of a family unit she initially assumed she was just visiting. Whether that forced-family dynamic is menacing or comforting is up for interpretation, as everyone involved discovers in their own time.

Miroirs No. 3 might play with the themes & tensions of a classic Hitchcock thriller (most notably, Vertigo), but its scene-to-scene conflict is largely quiet, requiring an active patience from its audience that Hitchcock would never take for granted. On the genre scale, it’s more closely aligned with recent Euro thrillers like When Fall is Coming, Misericordia, and Sibyl than any of the classic Hitchcock titles they might individually recall. It’s cozier than it is thrilling. All action beats are heard offscreen, never seen. Even the dialogue is quiet & sparse, with most of the conflict between members of this makeshift family conveyed via meaningful stares. From the very start, Paula Beer’s concussed protagonist is characterized as a passenger, riding silently in cars and making passing eye contact with strangers so inhumanly stoic they practically function as specters of Death. The way she finds a place where she feels welcome & settled enough to call home might be morally perverse (given that her new foster family pressures her to unwittingly take the place of another missing woman), but there’s genuine temptation in continuing to play house there. The audience stews in the discomfort of figuring out who she’s replacing, whether she’ll accept the role, and what her new fake family will do if she rejects them. Petzold’s gamble is in hoping that discomfort is enough to sustain our attention without having to pacify us with onscreen acts of violence like, say, a car crash.

Petzold’s films are a little too deliberately understated to fully register as major movie events to the world at large, but previous titles like Phoenix, Transit, Afire, and the aforementioned Undine all mean a lot to a few. Miroirs No. 3 will undoubtedly be the Movie of the Year for a certain kind of movie nerd who’s dying to share a beer with Paula Beer, offering several memeable moments of her cracking open some cold ones for anyone who’d be interested in such a thing. For everyone previously unfamiliar with the Beer-and-Petzolds name brand, it’ll likely pass by like a gentle breeze — pleasant but hardly noticed.

-Brandon Ledet

Agon (2026)

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During the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, I caught a couple live TV broadcasts of women’s fencing matches, expecting to watch some good old-fashioned swordfighting from world-class athletes. It turns out, modern fencing looks a lot more like retro sci-fi B-movies than the Old Hollywood swashbucklers I was picturing. I expected the competitors to be protected by masks & padding, sure; I just didn’t expect them to be plugged into electronic sensors, with each of their scores marked by lights & beeps when they completed a circuit with their foils, seemingly making the on-site referees just as vestigial as they are in the WWE. The new Italo arthouse headscratcher Agon presents the first cinematic instance I know of where modern, computerized fencing is represented at length onscreen, no longer relegated to bi-annual Olympic sports broadcasts. In fact, the sci-fi futurism of modern sports is just about the only thing on first-time writer-director Giulio Bertelli’s mind, as he spends Agon‘s entire runtime pondering & cataloging the various machines that have transformed the Olympic Games into an uncanny, inhuman abstraction rather than a straightforward demonstration of pure athletic prowess. It’s a surprisingly alienating, dissociative approach to the sports-movie formula, boldly announcing that the techno future of the sports drama is here, and it is terrifying.

In a semi-documentary style, we watch three women train & compete in various combat sports for a fictionalized version of the Olympics called The Ludoj Games. One is a fencer, who is physically plugged into the various computer sensors that have gradually transformed the sport into a live-action video game. Another is a sharpshooter, who is convinced that her own sport will become a literal video game in the near future, replacing traditional firearms with laser rifles. The third is a judo fighter, who you’d think would be safe from the encroachment of computer electronics in her sport, except that every aspect of her training and bodily maintenance requires high-grade, cutting-edge medical tech. Watching these women work at their craft is both chilling & beautiful, literalizing the ways that athletes’ bodies are precisely calibrated machines by surrounding them with endlessly bizarre, precisely calibrated machines. They hone their skills in abstract video game simulations. They measure their lung performance on treadmills by wearing Darth Vader-style breath masks. They reveal hidden injuries through X-rays & MRIs. They relieve stress between matches by streaming hentai on their smartphones. The entire film plays like a high-end version of those brain-rot video compilations of “satisfying factory machines,” minimizing the athletes’ bodies to an organic product of highly coordinated industrial processing.

Beyond its pronounced fetishism for the modern tech of sports medicine, Agon seems particularly interested in the exact tipping point where the simulated violence of combat sports turns into actual, physical harm. Very early on, our buff judo fighter suffers a painful knee injury, and we watch surgeons reconstruct her newly bionic body in intense documentary gore before she attempts to rehab her way back to the top of her field. Soon after, the sharpshooter lands in hot water with her financial sponsors over amoral hunting practices she’s engaged in outside the games, effectively transgressing by using her instrument for the exact purpose it was initially designed for – give or take her choice of target. It’s initially unclear what the fencer’s personal crisis with unstimulated violence could possibly be, and then it turns out she’s got it the worst out of the trio (especially once it’s revealed in the end credits that her own tragedy is inspired by a real-life freak event in the sport’s recent past). When the sharpshooter complains to an official representative of the games that she’s being professionally punished for her private behavior, the rep shoots back that, “There’s no room for violence here.” That’s a little rich, considering that the only sports profiled here are all simulations of violence, more military exercise than wholesome pastime.

When our psuedo-violent, semi-computerized athletes finally compete in The Ludoj Games, there is no live audience on hand to witness their technical achievements & failures. The games are staged in an abstracted black-box void, only to be witnessed by on-site officials, expensive camera rigs, and the all-important digital sensors. Obviously, this choice is at least partially driven by budgetary restraints, but Bertelli finds a way to make that limitation emphasize the cold post-humanism of modern Olympic sports. His interest in the subject appears to be somewhat personal, too, considering his advertised background in offshore sailing and, subsequently, the production of offshore sailing equipment. Not for nothing, but Bertelli also has familial ties to the fashion-industry royalty of Prada & Miu Miu, which is a dynasty he has attempted to professionally distance himself from but still shows in his filmmaking style. There’s a couture streetwear coolness in the way his three athletes model their sports’ various far-out gadgets, even as Bertelli dwells on the uglier, grotesque aspects of modern Olympic physicality. The movie is overall just as hip & fashionable as it is alienating & disorienting. Even the title “Agon” reads like the name of a fictional fashion brand, despite its intended academia as the Greek word for “conflict,” once used to describe the ancient, pre-computerized Olympics, BC.

-Brandon Ledet

The Mummy (1999)

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

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

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

A lot of the CGI here will look dated to the modern eye, even to those of us who remember this as being an extravaganza of realist effects. A lot of it still works because its uncanniness can be excused as a matter of course for a horror flick, but the CGI Thebes stands out as particularly video game-esque. The rewatch of this was prompted by the upcoming release of the aforementioned Lee Cronin Mummy, but the timing happened to align with Passover having recently happened, and I realized I had always thought of this as a kind of Passover movie, a secular alternative to The Ten Commandments that also happened to contain the plagues. (Toads and frogs are one of the ones that are left out, presumably because every amphibian wrangler in Hollywood was working on Magnolia at the time.) Preteens, like I was when I first saw it, are really the best demographic for this film, as its overwritten corny dialogue and telegraphed acting choices read like a throwback to old-timey pictures, until you’ve watched as many of them as I have and realize it’s more shallow parody than homage. Weisz and Fraser are sexy, yes, and they have great chemistry together, but Rick is much more of an asshole than I remember, and Evey, with her clumsy awkwardness and frustration at Cambridge’s rejection of her despite her outsized genius, feels like a fanfiction character, right down to her being a nepo baby. 

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

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Furious (2026)

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Every year at Overlook Film Fest, you’ll overhear some pedantic grumblings about what films do or do not technically qualify as horror, which is ostensibly the festival’s main programming hook. Personally, I love that the festival abides by loose genre definitions, since it’s allowed some of the more surreal, dreamlike titles to sneak into the line-up, like Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud, David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, and Jennifer Reeder’s Knives & Skin, which were each met with some audible festivalgoer confusion. That’s why it was such exciting news that Overlook introduced a new sidebar selection of titles for this year’s lineup that freed it from having to even pretend that every offering is strictly horror, avoiding the complaint entirely. That “Side Shows” sidebar was described in the program as “genre diversions from horror tailor made for the world of the Overlook,” and the very first title that screened in the sub-section delivered on the promise: a not-even-horror-adjacent action thriller that featured some of the most gruesome, fucked up gore gags you could find anywhere at this year’s festival. It was a raucous good time, and no one felt hoodwinked.

The Furious is a child-abduction martial arts revenger from longtime fight choreographer Kenji Tanigaki, who seems determined to leave no audience left unimpressed with his commitment to craft. Much like this year’s straight-to-streaming actioner The Forbidden City, The Furious takes great care in staging elaborately brutal fight choreography so that each blow is just as precise as it is inventive, recalling the 80s & 90s Hong Kong action heyday when Tanigaki would’ve gotten his start. This particular outing is way more ruthless & relentless than The Forbidden City, though, both in the extremity of its violence and the extremity of the real-world evils that violence aims to avenge. After his daughter is abducted by human traffickers in broad daylight, an ordinary tradesman with extraordinary martial arts skills (Mo Tse) teams up with a rogue investigative reporter (Joe Taslim) to systematically murder every scumbag involved, freeing the children they’re holding hostage in the process. It’s the kind of man-on-a-mission action thriller that sincerely believes all the evils of the world can be solved with the swing of a hammer, like You Were Never Really Here restaged as an action thriller.

The sizes & shapes of the hammers our heroes swing vary wildly, from ball-peen to sledge to bike peddle to concrete chunk on a pole. When Mo Tse gets the hammer-vengeance started by taking down an entire underground MMA nightclub with just the ball-peen in hand, his over-the-top ultraviolence is scored with Mortal Kombat-style techno, signaling that the party is getting started. The Overlook Side Show screening was near-riotous from those first few minutes of mayhem until the very end, with the crowd loudly groaning at every hammer-smashed skull and cheering on the swift justice against every ghoulish villain in our heroes’ path. The Furious takes a pro wrestling approach to morality, with very clear faces & heels on either side of the good vs. evil divide. Simplistic or not, it’s difficult to not get emotional watching children get put in peril for petty payouts by heartless goons, especially when those children start bonding and looking after each other in their dingy-dungeon captivity. Despite the severity of that subject, Tanigaki keeps the mood oddly light & fun, continuing the Hong Kong fight-choreo tradition of utilizing every single prop that appears onscreen during the fights: garbage bags, ladders, water cooler bottles, whatever’s hanging around. It’s shockingly grim, but it’s also a total blast.

Because of its predilection for hammers and its momentary indulgence in a sideway-scroller hallway fight, The Furious will likely inspire a lot of comparisons to Park Chan-wook’s breakout cult classic Oldboy, but I think that sets up a much narrower expectation of the action’s scope than what Tanigaki’s imagination for fight gags can deliver. Personally, I found myself thinking back to the wild tonal swings of RRR, which alternates from abject human misery and sublimely goofy genre payoffs at the same delirious pace. Speaking of which, The Furious is very likely the best action movie I’ve seen since RRR, give or take Furiosa. It also very likely means something that every action movie I’m likening it to in this review happens to be about some form of human trafficking, solving a complex international issue with simple acts of brute-force justice. That simplicity is a major strength here, especially in the way it invites genre-savvy audiences to cheer in unison one gory gag after another. I hope the Overlook programmers were encouraged by that loudly enthusiastic reception and will push the new Side Shows section to even further genre extremes next year. Let’s see how wild & fucked up this beautiful thing can get.

-Brandon Ledet

Exit 8 (2026)

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I’ve been seeing a lot of advertising (or maybe just the same thumbnail from a singular YouTube video, over and over) for Exit 8 that refers to the film as “Cube meets Tokyo.” Despite the fact that we already had that, and it was bad, I was still intrigued enough by the trailer to want to give this one a shot. The premise is fairly simple. A lost man (Kazunari Ninomiya) finds himself caught in a repeating loop of the same few sections of corridor in an underground subway tunnel. Initially spooked at finding himself completely alone and unable to locate an exit, he encounters increasingly unsettling visions before realizing that there are a set of instructions on the wall that boil down to “continue walking until you encounter an anomaly, then turn around and keep walking.” Said anomalies surface as things as relatively mundane as misplaced doorknobs and distant voices of crying babies to mutant rat creatures that resemble the experiments he barely noticed while scrolling through social media on the train. The lost man is in a state of turmoil, having learned that his ex-girlfriend is pregnant mere moments after he failed to confront a salaryman on the train for screaming at a mother with a cranky infant, then immediately finding himself in the infinitely-looping corridor. When he encounters a little boy (Naru Asanuma) and realizes that he’s not part of whatever purgatorial situation within which he’s been entrapped, he and the child try to get out together. If they can get through all eight levels without being deceived or overlooking an anomaly, they’ll find their way out. 

I’m going to make three points of comparison here to horror movies past, and Cube is not going to be one of them. First, in what I intend to be the most flattering comparison, Exit 8 has a great deal of similarities to one of my favorite horror films, Jacob’s Ladder. The 1990 Adrian Lyne film features Tim Robbins as a man potentially trapped in a reality he can’t be sure is real while experiencing subliminal visions of horrors beyond his comprehension, with a few memorable sequences set in the NYC subway system. Exit 8 dilates those underground set pieces to encompass the entire purgatorial situation, which is a neat trick, and it plays with the hypnotic monotony of depersonalized commuting in a series of seemingly identical hallways. Jacob’s Ladder finds Robbins’s character interacting with an almost angelic version of the deceased son he lost (a pre-Home Alone Macaulay Culkin), who helps him in a way that I can’t really talk about without spoiling that film, other than to say that Jacob’s journey, like The Lost Man’s, requires a certain level of acceptance. 

Secondly, in what I intend to be an unflattering comparison, Exit 8 has the distinction of being the second horror film I’ve seen so far this year that also happens to be, intentionally or not, pro-life propaganda. Concerning! Arguably, this one’s the worse of the two. At least in Undertone, the choice of whether or not to keep her baby was a decision that the mother was making; here, one of her only lines of dialogue, repeated almost as often as we see the “Exit 8” sign is, “Which is it?” Still, this is mitigated by the third point of previous film similarity, which is a neutral comparison at best. Exit 8 reminds me most of Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child, in that they have the same (mildly spoilery) conceit, which is that the protagonist is guided by a specter of their as-yet-unborn child. In Dream Child, that takes the form of Alice’s fetus appearing to her as a young child in her dreams and helping her fight Freddy Krueger; here it’s The Boy, who responds to an apparition of The Lost Man’s girlfriend by calling for her as his mother, revealing that he is, somehow, the man’s son. 

From what I can tell by perusing some reviews and summaries of the video game this film adapts, the player character therein is an utterly blank canvas, and there’s no real “plot” to speak of: no unplanned pregnancy woes, no encounters with a non-anomaly character like The Boy, no shameful cowardice at failing to confront a raging asshole. It doesn’t even seem like The Lost Man’s asthma, which I assumed had to be a gameplay mechanic, originated there. All of this is newly written for the film, and while I understand that the film, being based upon a game that is all about the mechanics and the tension rather than any real narrative, had to come up with some stakes. I’m not sure why it had to be this narrative, but the other way that this most evokes Dream Child is that its pro-”keeping the baby” messaging is also so bizarrely incoherent that it utterly falls apart; Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach” ends up being more effectively propagandistic in just a couple of minutes than Exit 8 and Dream Child combined. It’s not a defense of the film’s politics, but it’s so sloppy that it’s hard to grasp onto anything substantial enough to be annoyed by. 

I suppose, eventually, we do have to get around to examining this film in conversation with Cube. When we talked about that film on the podcast (as well as its sequel and prequel), Brandon’s primary complaint was that what Cube failed to deliver upon was the promise of cool death traps in the series of successive, identical, cubical rooms. As someone who saw those movies in earlier, more formative years, I already had an idea of the shape of the narrative, so I wasn’t set up to be underwhelmed by the ride in the same way that he was. I experienced my own great disappointment when we watched the 2021 version from Japan, which, among its many other faults, broke the cardinal rule of The Cube: we should never see what’s outside The Cube. I was very frustrated the first time that Exit 8 also showed us something that was happening outside of the liminal space in which our characters are trapped, as we see the woman on the other end of the phone call that The Lost Man receives while lost in the corridors. This does turn out to be an (obvious) misdirect, but there’s a sequence that comes later in which The Lost Man imagines himself on the beach with The Boy and his mother, and I can’t help but think that would feel more emotionally impactful if we didn’t have the earlier scene, and that conversation in itself would be more exciting if we only saw The Lost Man’s end of the line and stayed inside the spooky hallway. 

Further, the film’s decision to literalize the metaphor with The Boy, by making him actually be his future son rather than simply a reflection of what his future child could be. It’s a hat on a hat, lacking a subtle touch that would make the film more emotionally impactful. I’m grasping at straws trying to articulate it, but it’s almost as D.O.A. an idea as making Newt be Ripley’s actual daughter in Aliens rather than an objective correlative representing her guilt about outliving her actual child. Excise the scene in which The Boy recognizes The Lost Man’s ex as his mother and this is instantly a more thoughtful movie, even if you leave in the beach dream. That also lends more emotional heft to what we learn about The Walking Man (Yamato Kochi), who appears as part of the loop in The Lost Man’s journey, but whom we learn was himself a previous captive of the space who was trying to find his own way out. When he experiences frustration with having to start over after getting within spitting distance of level eight, he laments that he “was supposed to meet [his] son today.” As a manifestation of what The Lost Man could become, it’s admittedly a little on the nose, but it too would feel more nuanced if we just cut out the “mother” stuff. 

All of these quibbles having been laid out, it’s worth noting that this is a fun experiment and a masterful success on a technical level. The space itself is perfectly sterile and unsettlingly empty. The opening sequence, which is shot entirely in the first person, is an impressive feat, with the first shot we see of our main character being his reflection in the window of the subway car as he turns up his music to ignore the verbally abusive salaryman. I had a very immersive experience, as the only tickets still available were in the very front row, and I had a hell of a ride even as I found myself stumbling over the film’s slippery, amorphous thesis. I also appreciate that the film is open-ended; this is a mild spoiler, but after he manages to find Exit 8 and return to the real world, The Lost Man once again finds himself in a (presumably) metaphorical loop, as he experiences an identical situation as the one which opened the movie, as the same salaryman is screaming at the same young mother. The film cuts to credits with our lead once again staring into his own reflection. It seems that most reviewers infer that he will now confront this man and make up for his earlier bystander syndrome. I prefer to read the ambiguity of the ending from the other direction, and that for all he experienced in the liminal subway corridor he’s still essentially the same man, cowardice and all. It leaves some room for interpretation, that there may be some truth in his conviction that a person who stands idly by while someone is aggressively harassed may not be suited to parenthood. It’s not a mark in this film’s favor that I’ve spent so much time describing the film that I wish it was rather than the film that it is, but it’s still an excellently executed premise, and worth checking out for its design and camera movement if nothing else. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Boorman and the Devil (2026)

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As much as I love the movies, I hate moviegoing audiences – at least en masse. Chatting with individual festival attendees at this year’s Overlook Film Fest was as warm & friendly as always, like meeting up with old friends who I’ve technically never met before. Then, watching Boorman and the Devil at that same fest reminded me just how rare of an experience it is to celebrate the artform with a like-minded crowd. David Kittredge’s documentary about the production & public perception of John Boorman’s Exorcist sequel The Heretic is an intensely alienating experience for true cinephiles, a reminder that most people who go to the movies don’t care at all about art. They are not open to being challenged; they demand satisfaction. It’s repugnant. Even when Kittredge gets cutesy about the mass-audience rejection of The Heretic, I could feel my blood boiling in general misanthropy, loathing every person I see on the street like that one Robert Crumb comic panel.

After the overwhelming financial success of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, Warner Bros threw an obscene amount of money at Linda Blair to return for a cash-in sequel, alongside new-to-the-franchise costars Richard Burton & Louise Fletcher. They also gave free rein to New Hollywood auteur John Boorman to take the Exorcist story in any direction he wanted, an opportunity Boorman leveraged to deliver a hypnotic arthouse nightmare that recalls The Exorcist in name only. His vision was met with wide public derision, derailing his career until he could redeem himself with another hit in Excalibur a few years later. So, who are we supposed to side with here? The incurious audience who laughed The Heretic off the screen for taking chances instead of delivering more of the same? The studio executives who lost money or an artistic gamble? Or the artist himself, who improbably staged a literal fever dream on someone else’s dime? There is only one morally acceptable answer.

Boorman developed a life-threatening fever while filming The Heretic, a direct result of his own overly demanding ambition. That wasn’t the only on-set disaster. Burton struggled to stay sober enough to deliver his lines while standing still. Fletcher barely made it through the shoot before needing to have her gall bladder removed in emergency surgery. Blair spent long hours dangling off the roof of a skyscraper, unharnessed. Meanwhile, Boorman’s sick-leave absence opened a power vacuum for his screenwriting partner Rospo Pallenberg to run wild & unchecked on set, an off-putting presence that almost inspired open mutiny. The production was so troubled that the crew joked it was cursed by the demon Pazuzu himself, but none of that would’ve mattered if Boorman ultimately delivered a hit.

Kittredge relays these production-delay anecdotes from people who were actually there via tried-and-true documentary clichés that barely liven up the still set-photo imagery: first-person narration in his own voice, talking-head interviews with film critics & historians, cut & paste animation, and periodic chime-ins from fellow filmmakers with no direct association to the subject at hand (namely, Karyn Kusama, Mike Flanagan, and genre-doc mainstay Joe Dante). However, while Kittredge doesn’t match Boorman’s sense of poetic imagination, he is sincerely in awe of it, which goes a long way. This is not a movie about how Exorcist II: The Heretic was a laughable disaster; it is a story about how ambitious, risk-taking art isn’t always appreciated by the public, who’d rather laugh in mockery then get lost in cinematic poetry. Fuck ’em. They don’t know what they’re missing.

-Brandon Ledet

Leviticus (2026)

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Looking back, it’s impossible to fully measure the impact that David Robert Mitchell’s indie horror phenomenon It Follows has had on the past decade of high-concept, mid-budget genre filmmaking. Predating Robert Eggers’s atmospheric folk horror The Witch by a full year, It Follows now registers as ground zero for the “elevated horror” trend of the 2010s (give or take The Babadook). Its supernatural stalker plot about a shapeshifting, sexually transmitted specter has directly influenced works as cerebral as Brea Grant’s feminist head-trip Lucky and as lizard-brained as Parker Finn’s suicide-virus thriller Smile. It’s a little silly, then, that Mitchell is currently working on a proper It Follows sequel titled They Follow, considering how many iterations there have already been on the original’s mood & conceit. I even saw a new one just this week at The Overlook Film Festival, which borrows the invisible-stalker device from It Follows for a story about an entirely different kind of sexual menace.

The rural horror story Leviticus shares some notable cast & crew with the recent Aussie hit Talk to Me, including actor Joe Bird (the cursed hand’s most brutally tormented victim) as its teen-in-peril lead. Leviticus plays more like a spiritual sequel to It Follows, though, shifting that seminal film’s focus from heterosexual desire to a wholly queer sensibility. Instead of the It Follows demon being sexually transmitted among careless hetero twentysomethings, it’s forced upon gay teenagers as a supernatural form of conversion therapy. The shapeshifting demon’s form is also no longer randomized the way it was in Mitchell’s film. It instead appears before its victims in the shape of the person they desire most, acting like the gay-conversion version of those Disulfiram pills that “cure” alcoholics by making them sick when they taste booze. The goal appears not to be curing teens of their homosexuality, exactly, but to frighten them too much to act on their desires, lest they be gaybashed by a demon that looks like their hottest crush.

Bird stars as a lonely teen who’s just moved to macho small-town Australia with his religious zealot mother (Mia Wasikowska, who not too long ago was playing youthful brats instead of their stern maternal figures). He quickly develops a mutual crush on a classmate (Stacy Clausen), who only expresses his desire in private – first through roughhousing, then through smooching. The boys’ timid love story would make for a cute indie rom-dram if it weren’t for all of the religious nuts in town, who have developed a hypnotic ritual involving a butane lighter that chains gay teens to the aforementioned variation on the It Follows demon. The rules of the curse are fairly simple. The demon looks like the person you desire most, and it only attacks when you are alone. The metaphor that first-time director Adrian Chiarella is getting at is a little vaguer, though, to the movie’s benefit. Much like It Follows, it finds a way to physicalize a form of sexual menace & repression without overly explaining what it represents in dialogue (a temptation later derivatives like Smile cannot resist).

That’s not to say that Chiarella doesn’t make a coherent point with this conceit. It’s clear that the real evil here is the isolation caused by small-town bigotry, forcing gay teens into the darkest of closets. The cure for not being destroyed by that desire is to never be alone, to be out in public instead of saving your romantic trysts to private hookups, locked away in dingy warehouses where you can never be sure if you’re making out with a boyfriend or his evil doppelganger. There’s some heartfelt, meaningful social commentary in there, but the basic rules and mechanisms of its central metaphor are just mysterious enough that it doesn’t feel overly schematic in the moment. If there’s anything Chiarella doesn’t handle especially well tonally, it’s in the overall bleakness of every last interaction. Leviticus is a dour film with little room for humor in its metaphysical exploration of the tyranny of the closet. That tonal severity is appropriate for its subject but a little grueling to trudge through at feature length. Even It Follows included a few sight gags between its slow-burn scares, and that’s clearly the template we’re working with here, as we so often are.

-Brandon Ledet

Obsession (2026)

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Is there a more dependable path to horror filmmaking success right now than getting your start in sketch comedy? Following in the recent footsteps of sketch-turned-horror comedians Jordan Peele, Zach Cregger, and the Philippou Brothers, up-and-coming director Curry Barker has graduated from YouTube prankster to buzzy horror auteur du jour. The connection between those two artforms feels obvious, at least in the way that they deal in high-concept premises that need to be quickly explained and then immediately punctuated with punchlines. There’s an overt, sadistic humor in the way Barker cyclically builds & relieves tension in his debut feature Obsession that feels like a natural progression from the sketch comedy format. More importantly, these post-YouTube sketch creators speak directly to a youthful audience, playing to the prankish sensibilities of teens & twentysomethings instead of dwelling in the overly patient rhythms of recent decades’ “elevated horror”, which is quickly becoming the genre equivalent of le cinéma de papa.

I mention the youth appeal of Obsession up-front because it’s a movie tailored for people whose greatest concern in life is still their unreciprocated romantic crush, or who’s fucking whom at that their go-nowhere retail job. There’s more cowardly, unreciprocated yearning in this gross-out gore film than you’ll find in even the wimpiest teen-romance anime. Yes, you will see skulls crushed, skin carved, and house pets desecrated, but the most discomfort you’ll feel is in watching a twentysomething coward fail to muster up enough courage to confess he has a crush on his coworker. Instead, he resorts to supernatural magic, making a wish on a cursed children’s toy that she will love him “more than anyone in the whole frickin’ world.”  Of course, the wish quickly backfires, as our yearning anti-hero can’t handle the intensity of being desired instead of quietly doing the desiring himself, in private. Don’t worry, he’s also cosmically punished for the crime of using magic to coerce a peer into a nonconsensual sexual relationship, cruelly & usually.

Michael Johnston does a perfectly cromulent job playing that supernaturally tortured anti-hero, remaining a useless coward all the way to the very end. He’s frequently told by the more magic-savvy mystics in town and the One Wish Willow customer service reps that he can break the spell at any time by killing himself, but that would require action, while he is purely a creature of thought. Johnston convincingly contorts his brow with worry while considering his increasingly grim, shrinking options, never brave enough to act on any one of them. However, the real discovery here is his costar Inde Navarrette as his magically coerced crush, who’s tasked to deliver a much bigger, bolder performance. Through Navarrette, Obsession turns Quirky Movie Girlfriend behavioral tropes into a grotesque horror show, delivering cinema’s first truly scary Manic Pixie Nightmare Girl. It turns out, the Quicky Movie Girlfriend archetype is still a little cute even in that context, and Navarette performs some of the best uncanny smizing seen onscreen since Anna Kendrick first became a star. She does other tricks too, like strutting backwards, discovering culinarily unconventional sources of protein, and acting as her new boyfriend’s personal sleep paralysis demon – whatever it takes to keep them close.

In its broadest terms, Obsession is a classic “careful what you wish for” Monkey’s Paw story, and Barker has admitted in a recent Fangoria interview that he initially got the idea while watching the “Monkey’s Paw” vignette from the Simpsons‘ Treehouse of Horror specials. It’s probably notable that Jordan Peele named his own production studio Monkeypaw Productions after the same short story, just as it’s notable just how much Obsession‘s house party sequence recalls the ritualist peer-pressure magic of the Philippou Brothers’ Talk to Me. Barker clearly belongs in this new class of sketch-to-horror auteurs, unafraid to prank his audience with shamelessly unfair jump scares. All that matters, really, is getting the laugh or the gasp from the audience in the moment, which Obsession did remarkably well at its local premiere opening this year’s Overlook Film Fest. Leave the worry about good taste & artistic restraint to the elevated horror fuddy-duddies of the recent past.

-Brandon Ledet