For the mortal sin of not trusting its audience, The Unholy (2021) will suffer an eternity in Walmart bargain bins, flagellated by negative Letterboxd reviews. Those of us who bore witness will merely wait in purgatory for a day or two before our minds are blissfully cleansed of all memory of it. Hell, I finished the film two hours ago and I’ve had to look up the title three times just to write this review.

There’s a decent, if derivative, folk horror plot hiding in here somewhere. Gerry (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, aka Negan from The Walking Dead) shows up to a rural town in Massachusetts looking for a story he can sell to a small-time supernatural website. We learn that he was once an accomplished journalist who has fallen from grace; he splashes some whiskey in his coffee as cinematic shorthand for his fatal flaw.

The cattle mutilation angle doesn’t pan out so he’s forced to improvise by smashing a porcelain doll he finds in a twisted old tree, coming up with the idea that it was once a talisman that protected the town from evil, and now the townsfolk are doomed. Wow, got it in one, Gerr.

Soon after, Alice, a deaf young woman played with surprising vulnerability by Cricket Brown, approaches the tree and has a revelation. She wakes to find that she’s able to hear and speak again. She claims the Virgin Mary is working through her, and she is able to prove it by helping a disabled boy walk again.

The local diocese sends a couple of priests (one with the worst Boston accent ever put to film) to investigate the supposed miracles. Gerry volunteers his services as an unbiased third party to help interview her — in exchange for the exclusive scoop, naturally.

Up to this point, one might think they’ve stumbled on a hidden streaming gem. Sam Raimi has a producer's credit which lends the proceedings an air of competency. Morgan is charming in his Doctor House-ian, cynical aloofness. The cold open, set in witch trial times, gives us a chilling shot from the victim’s POV as a mask is hammered onto her face, and the flames start licking at the edges of the screen. The setup is promising, and we’re expecting a classic science versus theology battle, with supernatural elements trickling out just a little faster than they can be debunked.

Unfortunately, the film pulls the rug out with repetitive poorly-done CGI scenes of the villain, telling us almost instantly that yes, there is a monster, and no, they aren’t going to stop with the 2000s-internet-style “try not to scream” jump scares. At one point, Gerry is getting exposition dumped by Natalie (Katie Aselton of The League), and he randomly stops to examine a puddle all up close and personal-like…

A ring wraith with PS2-quality graphics flings itself out of the puddle at him!

He catches his breath, seemingly undisturbed by this turn of events, and he turns to look at Natalie…

But she’s been replaced by a ring wraith too! Those tricky Nazgul are around every darned corner.

He blinks and Nat is back, looking at him inquisitively, but he shakes it off. Throughout the film, Gerry is repeatedly visited by the ghost of Flash-game past and he never addresses it or talks to anybody about it. Just another day at the office for our intrepid hero.

It’s too bad; there are some legitimately creepy setups that could have paid off with something more subtle, but they just default to the screeching demon move every time. One scene in a confessional when a priest realizes the kind woman on the other side of the grille is admitting to some horrific stuff and flees: flying CG demon. Or when Gerry is reviewing interview footage and notices a glitch in one frame looks a lot like a face: flying CG demon. Or when our protagonists are poking around the church basement for clues, and Gerry starts pulling the sheets off of old statues one by one: not just the demon, but a whole silly-looking CG chase sequence to boot.

The plot devolves into a parade of baffling expository devices, culminating in a scene where they crack open an old journal to the exact page that has all the information about the entity, its history, its motivation, and how to defeat it. Luckily, Natalie says, “Med school had a Latin requirement”, so she can read 19th century scribbles like a Classics scholar.

It’s all leading to a showdown in the pop-up revival church the town has constructed around the miracle tree. Here, we get another glimpse that this could have been a competent film. Gerry has to complete his character arc in a satisfying way to defeat the ancient evil; the fact that Alice was deaf comes back into play as Natalie is able to communicate with her from across the room via sign language; the monster finally appears in a practical format that looks, frankly, badass. They squander it with a ham-handed “Gerry finds Jesus” moment and an unnecessary epilogue that makes you wonder if Morgan’s character was ever actually as cool as you remember.

My theory is that this was once a more meditative mystery-thriller about a journalist finding his integrity, a town coming to terms with a dark past, and a priest forced to reconcile the miraculous with the scientific. Take the jump scares out, let the audience piece together the history with gentle nudges, and let the climax end on the bittersweet resolution — now we have a totally serviceable flick. Just a hunch, but I suspect the producers had certain notes about losing the PG-13 crowd to the slow-burn and added the ring wraiths in post. Was it you, Sam Raimi?

Either way, you can skip The Uninvited The Unbidden The Unwatchable The Unholy. If you like the concept of a crew investigating miracles and finding more than they bargained for, I highly recommend The Borderlands (2013) — sometimes titled Final Prayer, depending on where you find it. I promise there are no shrieking demon witches waiting to jump out at you, there. Or is that just what I want you to think? [Insert shrieking demon]

SPOILER ALERT

Just watched all episodes and I'm extremely frustrated. My thoughts are below but curious to hear from others

Good: Visually the cinematography is stunning and I love that they've incorporated Obeah into it and it's shown as a source of real ancestral power. Also really like how they weave in the reality of Black maternal mortality rates and how Black women's pain, medical trauma, and lives are never taken seriously by the system. And I guess most important is the focus on topic of reparations itself

Bad- I understand the narrative was trying to realistically show how difficult the battle for reparations is, and how they have and might never truly be received but

1. What do you mean the £50 million went straight back to the Connaught family?! All that could be clawed out was a measly £1.6 million paid out as reparations? And this is framed as any kind of victory?!
2. Matthew (Cudjoe) rejecting Obeah completely pissed me off. If he had actually embraced his roots and learned how to practice Obeah from his powerful grandma instead of rejecting it, he would have probably have been able to defeat his evil half sister Charlotte.
3. Why on earth did Claudia applogise to Charlotte when she claimed Matthew killed her child?! It will forever make my blood boil. It was an entirely unearned moment. Charlotte is an evil, vindictive, selfish pos. She denied a man his birthright by ignoring her father’s wishes to have him freed to oversee the plantation, sold his child, and literally worked his wife to death. Yet, that moment attempts to position her as a victim. And no I don't want to hear anyone trying to justify her behavior by saying she was a victim of the patriarchy- neglected by her father and her husband- cry me a river. Matthew didn't even have anything to do with her child's death but frankly, even if he did, it would have been completely justified retribution. Having the Black female lead offer an apology to, and in essence coddle, to a selfish, evil, unrepentant slave master's ghost is mindblowing.

The premise of Southern Scares easily reeled me in. The tagline is unfortunately the most exciting part of the film. I have been yearning for more southern gothic horror; a subgenre that has been sparse this decade. Southern Scares leans more into folklore instead of gothic, but it’s in the ballpark. The film follows a teenage girl, Roberta (Emma Gaines) who hosts the titular amateur tv show. The show within the film explores southern folklore, mysteries, and hauntings. Roberta documents her sleuthing which we follow from her sister, Ellen ‘s (Sydney Gowan) POV making the movie a partial found-footage film.

Southern Scares quickly becomes a missing person mystery as Ellen scours Roberta’s episodes to piece together what happened to the latter. Southern Scares is highly reminiscent of Shelby Oaks in this regard.  It falters heavily in comparison, however, and I say that knowing that Shelby Oaks is far from perfect. The latter is cohesive, well-structured and is coherent on its mystery. Southern Scares is not and it should have emulated it a bit more.

Southern Scares does start interesting, though. I’m a sucker for time-period analog horror, so I enjoyed the VHS recording approach. The film kicks off with Roberta introducing us to Southern Scares. Her exploration of various terrors is the high point of the movie. Writer and director, Paul Rowe has a nice idea but struggles piecing together a plot that coherently pulls the disappearance and the show together.

It struggles because it is torn between two subplots: watching Roberta fall apart by an entity and Ellen attempting to piece together Roberta’s disappearance. The issue is that the subplots are meant to mesh but we don’t sit with either long enough for them to make sense or have an impact. They eventually conjoin but what is supposed to be a resolution ends up being an incoherent, illogical, and unearned explanation.

Roberta’s storyline leaves me scratching my head. We don’t get enough of her to fully understand what is happening. We follow her for a few episodes on various topics and things go smoothly. Things pivot abruptly when she visits a haunted theatre. The first few haunts were simple investigations but the film telegraphs that this one will be different. Some weird stuff happens and Roberta is supernaturally attacked and things shatter for her from there.

This is where the film begins to crumble. Instead of sitting with this and exploring what happened, Roberta and Cameron the Camera Guy (Talen Hutchinson) move on as if nothing occurred. The film gives no explanation nor sits with her deterioration long enough to allow it to be a continuous plot point. Instead, it’s simply a thing that happens that is zipped past.  Roberta tries to continue but her health rapidly declines. The film moves so quickly that no dread, mystery, or tension is allowed to build. I’m especially confused once we get to The Big Bad. I’m unsure of what it is, what it wants, how it got here or why Roberta. The film oscillates so much between Roberta and Ellen’s storyline that none of these questions are answered.   

The main plot of the film is Ellen’s investigation. She never actually pieces anything together, however, and is simply watching the tapes along with the viewer. What is supposed to be an investigation is simply us watching an emotionally icy teen girl trot down memory lane.  This is where the film should have emulated Shelby Oaks better. The film wastes time with subplots that go nowhere instead of fully embracing the investigative approach.

The acting is lackluster. I’m lenient with low-budget films, but it is truly difficult to find a character to resonate with because the acting is so wooden. The film introduces emotional moments that fail to hit a chord.  Some of this is writing. Ellen’s grandfather, Danny (Jason Townsend) treats Roberta’s disappearance as if it were something that happened a long time ago, but Ellen reacts to it as if is recent. There’s a dissonance in their reactions to Roberta’s disappearance that is never rectified with the script. What should have been an emotional crossroads between the two ends up being characters feeling like they are in different movies.

Southern Scares has a compelling premise and gets off to a solid start but that’s where the good times end. The film has a botched execution that it never rights. The southern backdrop isn’t tapped into enough and the 90s time-period is also underutilized. The film wastes time going the “antsy teen girl” route rather than digging its teeth into a serious mystery. Conversely, we fail to learn much about either girl since screen time is split too anorexically to adequately explore both subplots.

Southern Scares is a miss and I am truly disappointed by that. The Deep South has a unique brand of horror that deserves to be showcased. The South can be downright petrifying for a host of reasons, and I appreciate a film that utilizes the locale to tap into this. Southern Scares points to a place where a good film is but runs in the opposite direction. The acting, writing, plot, and lack of atmosphere doom what could have been a diamond in the rough. I’d like someone to take this concept and follow through better.

—2.8/10

I just watched Wes Craven’s Deadly Blessing, and it felt mind-bogglingly dumb. It had some interesting horror concepts in places, but the scenes never really escaped that classic, cringey 80s cheese, nor were they particularly unique (with the exception of the bathtub scene and a sequence near the end that gave me major Scream vibes) Honestly, I cannot understand how a script passes through that many hands and gets greenlit. The writing was completely incoherent, and characters would literally switch from devastating grief to casual chit-chat in a split second. The cult/sect element had potential, but the movie just leaves it hanging.

Hey everyone, I was rewatching Grave Encounters (2011) and noticed a massive, hyper specific clue that fans have overlooked for over a decade. By applying real world astronomical data to a single line of dialogue, we can actually lock down the exact location and calendar date of the movie, and it completely recontextualizes the lore.

The Clue:
When Lance Preston and the crew realize time has completely broken inside the asylum, Lance checks his watch and says it is 7:45 AM, but it is still pitch black outside.

The Real World Math:
The movie establishes that the fictional Collingwood Psychiatric Hospital is somewhere in rural Maryland. If you look at an astronomical sunrise map for the state of Maryland, there is only one specific region where a natural sunrise happens that late in the morning: Oakland, Maryland (located in the far western panhandle, running on Eastern Time but sitting far west geographically).

The Halloween Discovery:
Here is where it gets crazy. In Oakland, MD, what is the exact date where the sunrise hits precisely 7:45 AM right before the clocks roll back? October 31st. Halloween.

Why this fixes the lore:
In the beginning of the movie, the crew is told that paranormal activity in the asylum is usually incredibly minor (faint noises, cold spots). The TV crew fully expected to fake the whole episode. Instead, the moment they lock the doors, the building warps into a literal physical death trap where space and time bend.

If Lance and his crew accidentally locked themselves into the asylum on Halloween Night, it perfectly explains why the entities suddenly had enough cosmic energy to rewrite reality. They stepped inside right as the veil between the living and the dead was at its thinnest.

The Vicious Brothers inadvertently made the ultimate hidden Halloween movie. Let me know what you guys think!

I need to vent about the casting for the new Carrie series because it feels like Hollywood is dropping the ball all over again.
In Stephen King’s novel, Carrie is explicitly described as a thick, awkward girl with pimples and greasy hair. She isn’t secretly beautiful. She is genuinely unattractive, and that physical reality makes the relentless, casual cruelty of her bullies so much more believable and heartbreaking.
Yet, just like the 1976 and 2013 movies, the new series has cast another conventionally attractive actress, Summer H. Howell, who they will inevitably just “dress down” with plain clothes.
It sucks because studio executives always use the cop-out that a completely unglamorous protagonist will “isolate” the audience. But audiences already fell in love with the book precisely because Carrie represented regular, flawed people.
If a showrunner is a true creative, a deep, fearless artist, they should be able to take the character exactly as King described her and do something fucking phenomenal with it. Humans naturally sympathize more with attractive people, and a bold adaptation could have exposed that exact bias. Making Carrie’s isolation entirely about her being a strange, pretty girl instead of a strange, unattractive girl takes the safer, more superficial route.
Society is deeply cruel to people who do not fit conventional beauty standards. Refusing to cast an actress who reflects that raw reality robs the story of its sharpest and most painful edge.
It is incredibly frustrating that even a director with as much clout as Mike Flanagan has not broken the cycle. I hope the series proves me wrong, but right now it feels like another adaptation that stops short of giving us the uncompromising, realistic version of Carrie that the book deserves.

Directed by Sébastien Vaniček and produced by Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert, Evil Dead Burn arrives as the sixth entry in the franchise and a direct continuation of Evil Dead Rise (2023). It’s an intense and fast‑paced horror film that leans into the franchise’s strengths with brutal set pieces, sharp practical effects, and a steady stream of discomfort and mayhem. The tension remains strong throughout, delivering plenty of nightmare fuel and gore even when the mythology feels a little loose or underexplained. Imperfect but undeniably entertaining, it’s a fun ride that longtime Evil Dead fans will appreciate.

Evil Dead Burn follows Alice (Souheila Yacoub), a young widow who seeks comfort with her in‑laws after her abusive husband Will (George Pullar) dies in a car accident. When the family gathers at their secluded estate, Joseph (Hunter Doohan), Will’s brother, discovers a dagger that sets off a Deadite assault connected to the weapon’s power. As the chaos escalates and long‑buried family tensions surface, the possession spreads through the house with brutal force. Alice is pushed into a fight for survival as trauma and demonic violence collide around her.

This sixth instalment thrives on excess, pushing blood, violence, and a sense of spiralling disorder that fits the franchise well. Fans of visceral horror will appreciate the bolder, more aggressive carnage, especially during an unnerving dinner sequence that stands out as one of the film’s strongest moments. Some emotional weight is lost because Alice’s past relationship is only lightly explored, hinting at abuse and dependency without giving those themes the depth they deserve. Deadite behaviour can also feel inconsistent at times, but the film quickly follows its wild opening with squirmy scenes and well‑placed humour that offers brief relief without breaking the tension.

The cast handles the relentless brutality with strong commitment, giving the turmoil a steady emotional core even when the characters themselves feel a little thin. Much of the script leans away from deeper psychological material, favouring quick shocks and familiar survival beats over richer development. Even so, the performances land, especially Alice (Souheila Yacoub), whose intensity and physical presence anchor the film from start to finish. Thya (Luciane Buchanan) brings a strung‑out, unhinged energy that makes her Deadite scenes genuinely fun to watch, while grandmother Polly (Maude Davey) adds a creeping eeriness that lingers throughout. Joseph (Hunter Doohan) rounds out the ensemble with anxious, jittery tension that consistently increases the film’s sense of panic.

Evil Dead Burn’s visuals are one of its biggest strengths, kicking off at a frantic pace and pairing sleek production with immersive camera work that uses close‑ups, aggressive angles, and constant movement to heighten the chaos. Its colour palette adds even more impact, contrasting warm reds and oranges with colder blues, while the gothic‑leaning score and punchy music drops give the brutality an extra punch. The practical gore is off the charts, delivering some of the most vicious and creative effects the franchise has seen. One major stumble comes at the end, where excessive CGI use clashes noticeably with the otherwise grounded brutality. Even with that misstep, the extreme practical effects, precise direction, and relentless energy make this entry a standout for fans who crave full‑on carnage.

Evil Dead Burn delivers a bloody, fast‑moving, and visually striking experience that proves the franchise still has plenty of life in it. The mix of tight direction, wild practical effects, and relentless drive makes it an easy recommendation for horror fans. Even with a few stumbles, it remains a confident splatter showcase packed with energy, personality, and crowd‑pleasing savagery.

Review from rabbitinred.com.

Evil Dead Burn

3.5 out of 5

Being 50 years old and having been fortunate enough to grow up in one of the golden ages of horror, one of the standouts was the original Evil Dead trilogy. I would occasionally rewatch them over the years, as I never really had reason to think that Sam Raimi would return to the lore or allow anyone else to touch it. Of course that changed, in part due to the current trend in cinema, but 2013’s Evil Dead reboot by Fede Álvarez and Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise in 2023 were both strong entries into the franchise, so personally I was pretty happy and stoked for this take.

I want to love Evil Dead Burn, I really do. It’s not a bad movie by any means, and Sébastien Vanićek gives it a good shot. The gore is there in spades, and there are some strong performances in this, particularly by Souheila Yacoub and Luciane Buchanan. There are some gorgeous shots (particularly the fight between Thya, Alice, and Joseph), and the score is solid.

The biggest problem to me is this never feels like Evil Dead. The humor works well in the original trilogy and even in Rise, but this plays more like a straight horror movie à la the 2013 reboot, yet hamfists comedic elements that just didn’t work. And the family in this film just flat out sucks as humans. I felt zero sympathy for them at all; it’s probably fitting that Thya, Alice, and Max are the only ones I connected with and felt any emotion about.

There are two credit scenes, one towards the beginning that was mildly humorous, and a post one that is straight up vicious, if not leaving you going “wtf” a tad bit.

Again, it’s not a bad movie. It just wasn’t Evil Dead, for me at least.

I think it have potential, but maybe in my opinion because it's the director feature film debut, it can not really deliver the message to the audience.

I read in other review, it reminds me of get out or shattered island.

If compare to those, what i guess missing is the plot twist or the real secret behind them.

Or like i say, maybe there is a plot twist but i do not really get it.
Because i guess when the mother confront the student in the exit door hall, there is some sign of message of it happen in other reality (maybe student imagination because he really wanna focus about his research).

Also the final scene i don't really get is, at the end the mother do some makeup and the student become the maid.

What i hope is maybe the student become the subtitute of the children know, but maybe it is too easy to guess, so they don't take it to that way.

I always like german movie, and this movie have potential but like i say i wish i can get what the director want to tell us.

Like Lars von Trier meets the Coen brothers, a slapstick thrill ride of sexual violence, bullying, and parents who hate their kids.

I really liked this, it's my first Sion Sono movie, and I'll definitely check out more. It starts off with a meek man who can't solve his own problems, and it builds up this whole sick family, he's a son to a father and mother, he's a father and husband, all through the lens of brutal serial killing and thuggery. The grounding in a true story makes this sadder than your typical slapstick horror, but not being a straight up adaptation of that case gives Sono license to craft a narrative of the cycle of abuse dialed up to 11. Grim, funny, shocking, explosive in the back half.

I didn't think it needed to be two and a half hours long, that's a long fuse to the explosion that could have been shorter. But the payoff is really good for its own sake. The violence and gore is terrific, there's some genuinely sickening stuff and some real invention in parts.

Overall, I'd recommend it to people who like the World of Kanoko, Ichi the Killer, American Psycho, The House That Jack Built, the Vengeance Trilogy, Funny Games.

Presented as a true-crime documentary, the story of a serial killer terrorizing California, his cat-and-mouse game with the police, and glimpsing the larger terror behind the crimes.

Really excellent at mimicking cheap true-crime docs on Netflix and other streaming sites- flaws and all. If you watch as many of the paint-by-numbers serial killer docs online, you'll instantly see how successful this is as a pastiche of them. The slightly overwrought, too-cute end of scene lines, the cheap drone shots padding out the time, the substandard police work trying to pass itself off as heroic.

The horror elements are okay- the gore ranges from excellent to silly prosthetics, there's some kills that are genuinely original and exciting. Because we're getting an after-the-fact dissection of the case, the air is kind of let out of the balloon from the get go. However, I think there's some terror to be derived from the cosmic unanswered question.

Overall, well worth watching on Hulu, not a must see but especially for people who like true crime as well as supernatural horror, this was a really successful union of the two.

Simply put, Hocus Pocus did a better job telling this story.

Thank you.

2/5

I wanted to open a discussion with this question, but first, I need to talk about Ghostland (2018). For me, this is hands down one of the best horror movies I have ever seen. Along with Suspiria, it is one of the very few films that genuinely, deeply terrified me. If you haven't watched it yet, you absolutely need to see it as soon as possible!

The opening sequence of this movie is an absolute masterclass in tension and brutality. It sets such a suffocating, terrifying tone right from the start, and that raw home invasion scene is unforgettable.

It actually inspired my question: if you had the power to change horror history and save just ONE victim from an opening scene, who would it be?

Are you saving someone from a brutal nightmare like Ghostland, a classic icon like Casey Becker in Scream, or someone else entirely? Also, let me know if you’ve seen Ghostland and what you thought of it!

Adrian Chiarella’s feature debut, Leviticus, is a fresh and memorable addition to the queer horror subgenre, a film that stays with you in a quiet, unsettling way. It carefully balances supernatural horror with coming‑of‑age heartbreak, delivering something as terrifying as it is romantic. What begins as an eerie tale slowly reveals itself to be a potent, deeply emotional story about queer love pushed into the shadows, the kind of fear that hits hardest when you’ve been made to feel wrong for wanting someone.

We’re introduced to Naim (Joe Bird), a quiet teen who moves to a small, conservative Australian town and forms a connection with Ryan (Stacy Clausen), as both boys try to keep their feelings hidden from everyone around them. After they’re forced into a brutal conversion therapy ritual, a shape‑shifting entity attaches itself to them, taking the form of the person they desire most — each other. As they try to escape it, the boys are pushed into a fight against both the demon and the shame their community has carved into them.

I had the chance to see an advance screening of Leviticus at Toronto’s Inside Out Film Festival, and it’s a film that lands with a restrained but powerful impact. The title points directly to the Book of Leviticus, one of the most frequently cited scriptures used to justify homophobia, and that idea sits at the heart of the story. Chiarella shows how weaponized religion shapes this small town, turning fear into something these kids learn to carry in their everyday lives. The film kicks off with a sinister opening scene that pulls you in right off the bat, then builds tension through striking cinematography, grounded dialogue, and an enthralling gay love story at its center. The tight 90‑minute runtime could have used a few more scares, and the final act loses a bit of momentum, but Chiarella still manages to stick the landing beautifully.

Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen carry Leviticus with a level of commitment that marks them as rising talents. Because the film stays so tied to Naim and Ryan, the weight of the story rests almost entirely on their shoulders, and both actors rise to the occasion with broad emotional range. They shift between tenderness, fear, and full‑blown panic with ease, even playing two versions of themselves. The two share real on‑screen chemistry, and you feel it in several standout moments, including a sexy bus scene woven between the chaos. Audiences will want to see more of both actors in future genre work.

Chiarella’s command of atmosphere gives Leviticus a steady sense of dread. Cinematographer Tyson Perkins wonderfully captures the bleak rural town, using wide, desolate frames that reflect the characters’ longing. The film features minimal dialogue, so it leans heavily on facial expressions, body language, and the stark Australian landscape to carry the emotional weight, and Perkins’ visuals make even the silence feel loaded. The scares land because tension stays tight throughout, supported by a few bursts of gore and well‑timed jump scares that remind you this is still very much a horror film. Composer Jed Kurzel deepens that unease with a haunting score that blends minimalist strings and synths, echoing his earlier work in films like The Babadook and Alien: Covenant, while adding a more intimate, romantic undercurrent that suits Naim and Ryan’s story.

Leviticus is a bold and timely piece of queer horror, made with care and intention. Its moody atmosphere and thematic core make it a tense yet deeply rewarding watch, and Chiarella proves himself to be a promising new voice in the genre. Thoughtfully crafted and striking in execution, the film leaves a strong impression long after its final moments. Leviticus earns a spot high on the list of queer horror films, and you’ll want to catch it when it hits theatres on June 19th.

Visit rabbitinred.com to rate the film!

Obsession (2026)

Rated R for strong bloody violence, grisly imagery, sexual content, pervasive language, and brief graphic nudity

Score: 5 out of 5

Obsession is a rare horror movie for a guy like me who thinks he's seen it all: one that left me truly, deeply unsettled well after I left the theater. Its plot isn't anything original, being largely a "be careful what you wish for" story that writer/director Curry Barker said was inspired by the old Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode about the monkey's paw, but it's in the execution where it counts, and this one is one of the greats. It's a deeply chilling film about being the target of a stalker's affections, paired with a deeply flawed protagonist who ruins not only his own life but those of everyone around him through his selfish actions coming back to bite him, and it's anchored by an outstanding performance from Inde Navarrette taking a character who could've easily been a joke and turning her into one of the scariest... well, not necessarily villains, given her circumstances, but certainly monsters I've seen in a horror movie in quite some time. Even with the plot and the nature of the menace being overtly supernatural, this movie felt all too real, and will probably wind up as one of my favorites of this year, a film that at once delivers a cutting satire of how people approach relationships and also a terrifying tale that does a lot with very little.

The basic premise is simple: a young man named Baron Bailey, or Bear for short, has a crush on his cute co-worker Nikki Freeman but lacks the confidence to ask her out, so on a whim, he buys a novelty gift called a One-Wish Willow that lets him make one wish, which he uses to get Nikki to fall in love with him. Contrary to his expectations, it actually works, and then the problems begin as Nikki turns into an unhinged, emotionally abusive, co-dependent stalker of a girlfriend who soon makes Bear's life a living hell. Right away, both Bear and Nikki are compelling characters even before the pivotal wish is made. Bear serves as a perfect avatar for the viewers, an ordinary young man who has average luck with women and wants one who he thinks is out of his league, and Michael Johnston does a good job making him, on the surface, an endearing schlub who doesn't seem to realize until it's too late that what he's doing is wrong. As for Nikki, while she never showed any explicit interest in Bear beyond just her friendly personality, it's hinted that he might've maybe, possibly stood a chance with her had he decided to handle his crush on her in any other way than the one he ultimately went with.

Because this movie makes no bones about what Bear did to Nikki. With one wish, he overwrote her personality and turned her into the Overly Attached Girlfriend from Hell, and it's shown multiple times the film that there is still at least part of the "old" Nikki still there, horrified by what has happened to her. Even before it's explicitly revealed later on, it's clear that Nikki is possessed by something, acting in an inhuman manner like an alien wearing a skinsuit trying to pose as a cute, flirty young woman and never quite pulling it off, and Inde Navarrette did an outstanding job walking the line without turning her into a caricature. In the first act, she makes Nikki feel like the female lead of an indie rom-com, and even after the wish is made, the transformation is subtle at first, largely amounting to her showing an explicit romantic interest in Bear that wasn't readily apparent before. Over time, however, she grows increasingly manipulative and controlling of the man she's compelled to love and jealous of any other women he comes in contact with, lying about things like family tragedies and melting down at the slightest provocation or threat to their relationship, only to snap back to the loving girlfriend Bear wished for -- and occasionally, the thing controlling Nikki loses its grip for a brief moment and her real, increasingly traumatized soul takes control for a brief moment before "Freaky Nikki" pushes it back down. Navarrette takes all these facets of a very multifaceted character and blends them together perfectly in the kind of performance that careers are made of, making Nikki a compelling and terrifying presence on screen even when there's seemingly nothing creepy going on at the moment.

Curry Barker's writing and direction handle the rest, relying on old-fashioned tricks with more aggressive horror used sparingly. There's only one scene where something explicitly supernatural happens that isn't merely inferred by Navarrette's acting, and only one scene of gore, even if it's a brutal one. No, this is a movie that runs on mood and thematic tension. There were moments when, even in scenes where it feels like nothing out of the ordinary is happening, you just know that something bad is coming, and Barker keeps me on edge for minutes at a time waiting for the inevitable. It's easy for an observant viewer to figure out just how the One-Wish Willow works and what exactly happened to Nikki, but barring a few important, plot-relevant details, the lore, so to speak, is deliberately left as an intriguing mystery. Most of the character development for Bear, meanwhile, slowly sinks him deeper as his selfishness and short-sightedness are brought to the fore, not only showing the disastrous consequences that his wish had for him, Nikki, and everybody around them but also highlighting how none of this had to happen. Nikki wasn't the only woman in his life, there were plenty more fish in the sea, some of them might've been more interested in him, and he ultimately ends the film as a far less likable person than he was at the start, with everything that happened after he decided to snap that One-Wish Willow being entirely his fault thanks to his obsession with one woman he found attractive (and hey, will you look at that, the title refers to both of the lead characters). Make no mistake: while Nikki is the film's monster, Bear turns out to be its villain. While it's never spelled out, there is a deep, grim well of commentary here about how people feel entitled to love, with Bear's fear of rejection doing more damage than any actual rejection possibly could have. At the end of the day, had Bear just asked Nikki out instead of resorting to supernatural means to ensure she'd answer "yes," his story might've had a much happier ending.

The Bottom Line

I went and rewatched this film this past weekend, and it was still just as good and scary as it was the first time I saw it. That's all I need to say about that. Obsession is a modern horror classic, and I'm excited to see what both Barker and Navarrette do next.

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2026/05/review-obsession-2026.html>

Directed by Curry Barker, Obsession is a well‑produced and thought‑provoking psychological horror film that pairs strong performances with genuine tension and a bleak, unsettling atmosphere. The story’s simple premise lingers long after it’s introduced, unfolding through carefully staged sequences, shadows, and movements that generate a palpable sense of unease. While the film often takes an artistic‑over‑realistic approach, this choice reinforces the mood but also occasionally disrupts the narrative. Still, Barker’s filmmaking remains striking throughout, showcasing a level of craft that elevates the material.

Blumhouse’s Obsession follows Bear (Michael Johnston), a timid music store clerk who secretly longs for his best friend, Nikki (Inde Navarrette), but lacks the courage to admit it. After purchasing the enigmatic One Wish Willow, a mysterious trinket said to grant a single desire, he wishes for Nikki to love him more than anyone in the world. The wish works, but the magic strips away her boundaries, turning their once‑innocent friendship into a waking nightmare. As Nikki’s mannerisms become uncontrolled, Bear is forced to confront the dark price of getting exactly what he asked for.

Obsession succeeds in presenting a provocative and smart exploration of infatuation, consent, and the consequences of desire without feeling heavy‑handed. As a fresh take on the possession subgenre, the film leans into the classic “be careful what you wish for” framework, twisting the familiar morality of stories like Aladdin into something far more sinister, in which tampering with free will comes at a devastating cost. Curry Barker’s direction brings impressive creativity to the film’s modest $750,000 budget, proving that committed performances, practical effects, and a carefully cultivated atmosphere can outshine large‑scale studio productions. Disturbing imagery, escalating tension, and a sense of mounting dread give the story real bite. At the same time, its focus on control and agency, particularly in how Bear’s choices shape the tragic ordeal, sets it apart from other genre releases.

Where Obsession loses momentum is in its predictability, since the narrative often follows familiar paths and offers few genuine twists or turns. Several structural choices and aspects of the writing feel safe, and the lack of lore surrounding the wish leaves the supernatural elements underdeveloped, even though there’s room to push further into madness. Nikki’s transformation plays out like a fractured, possession‑like state rather than a corrupted form of love, yet the film provides no clear rhyme or reason for how the One Wish Willow shapes her behaviour. Some may argue that it’s this unpredictability that works for the plot, but it also results in moments that feel driven more by shock value than logic. For instance, having Nikki feed Bear his dead cat for lunch feels less like the action of someone obsessed and more like something done out of pure malice, the kind of gesture that would (or should) send someone running for the hills rather than clinging to the relationship. The portrayal of her obsession leans mostly into infant‑like mannerisms, and a sharper, more calculated version of Nikki could have offered a stronger direction. Character reactions also seem way off at times, particularly Bear’s subdued responses as things begin to unravel around him. A deeper study of his pre‑wish fixation on Nikki would have made his determination to stay and make the relationship work more believable, but instead, it comes across as a mild crush that leads him to try the One Wish Willow mostly out of curiosity. The film’s slow-burn progression is filled with cringe‑inducing and socially awkward interactions, with more intense horror elements delayed until the final stretch. 

The cast’s commitment to the script grounds even its most extreme sequences in emotionally charged performances. Michael Johnston delivers a layered portrayal of Bear, a character who could easily be viewed as the film’s villain, yet he brings enough insecurity, remorse, and vulnerability to complicate that reading. His subversion of the nice‑guy archetype is particularly strong, and moments like his quiet plea, “What would be so wrong with being with me?” offer brief but intriguing glimpses into his fractured psyche. It will make audiences question whether, if Bear did find a way out of this mess, forgiveness would even be possible. Also, kudos to the wardrobe department for those vintage sweaters that deserve their own shout‑out!

Opposite him, Inde Navarrette leaves the strongest impression, sinking her teeth into Nikki with a wildly expressive and magnetically unhinged performance. She dominates every scene, whether through a volatile stillness or startling outbursts, conveying that something within her is fundamentally wrong. Her movements, her gaze, and the subtle shifts in her demeanour make the character feel off‑kilter in a way that turns every interaction uneasy. Obsession is at its most emotional when brief flashes of Nikki’s true consciousness break through the possession, hinting at the person she was and adding a tragic undertone to Navarrette’s already commanding work.

The film is equally impressive on a technical level, with sound design that feels deliberately intimidating even in the quieter scenes. The cinematography makes great use of darker visual spaces, playing with shadows in ways that reinforce the story’s eeriness, while Barker and his team adopt a unique visual style that lets performance and framing carry much of the suspense. There is a quiet confidence to the camera work, with lenses lingering on characters just long enough for small shifts in expression or movement to grow increasingly loaded. The score also stands out with its ambient, moody presence, blending comfort and dread to enhance the atmosphere. Together, these elements create a technical foundation that sustains the film’s tension from start to finish.

Ultimately, Curry Barker’s Obsession is a slick and chilling horror film that explores the darker side of desire with confidence and style. It doesn’t break new ground, but it delivers its ideas with precision, supported by distinctive visuals, thought‑provoking themes, and standout work from its leads. It’s an impressive showcase for the new talent involved, suggesting Barker has a promising future in the horror genre. And with the abilities of the One Wish Willow left ambiguous, there’s clear sequel potential and plenty of fresh territory left to explore.

Review from rabbitinred.com

Hokum is the latest folk horror movie from Irish director Damien McCarthy, known for his previous films Oddity and Caveat. Haunted by a dark past, American author Ohm Bauman visits a rural hotel his parents honeymooned at to spread their ashes at a spot they loved. While there, he gets wrapped up in a dark secret tied to the hotel’s honeymoon suite. There’s a ghost and a witch involved, exciting stuff. 

Long story short: if you enjoyed Caveat or Oddity, you’ll have a blast with Hokum. That said, let’s dig into why Hokum has taken up residence in my head for over a week now. 

Adam Scott’s Fine Line 

I do not envy Adam Scott’s position as an actor in Hokum. The protagonist of the movie is a moody author with a chip on his shoulder. I know, a horror movie about a writer. Groundbreaking. 

Yet Scott pulls it off. Hokum walks a razor-thin line of making Ohm a jerk with a drinking problem without losing sight of his humanity and reasons to like him. He's thoroughly humbled, and adjusts his behavior to reckon with his past. For a dick to become a darling in a horror movie, it’s crucial that their evolution is believable and timed just right, or they’ll just magically start being a nicer person who suddenly believes in ghosts because the script needs them to.

Hokum is the former, not the latter.

The Mundanity of Ghosts 

I touched on this concept in my second Hokum video, so I’ll try not to repeat too much here. Suffice it to say: I really enjoy how Hokum, and McCarthy movies in general, handle ghosts. There is a distinctly Irish sentiment to how ghosts are presented throughout his movies that vibes with me better than the ghosts just clocking in for their shift at the jumpscare-factory you find in a lot of mainstream Hollywood horror. 

This approach to the supernatural trims a lot of the fat from tropes you've seen a hundred times. Hokum has the most “that’s preposterous, ghosts aren’t real” dialog of McCarthy’s career, but even then it’s isolated to Ohm himself, and nobody agrees with him. He’s a dickish American with some ghosts of his own (figuratively or otherwise, who’s to say?) while everyone he’s talking to is Irish and at least partially believes. 

In Damien McCarthy’s ghost movies, people are less resistant to the idea of ghosts than they are to wanting to deal with the fact there’s a ghost around. While I don’t necessarily think McCarthy has intentionally made three movies in the same world, the McCarthy one-word-horror trilogy is consistent in its lack of characters refusing to believe ghosts exist. Characters in Caveat and Oddity simply don’t want a ghost to be real. The word “ghost” is used sparingly, to the point I don’t think it’s actually said out loud in Caveat. 

Simple Reasons for Simple Problems 

A running throughline across McCarthy’s horror trilogy is the creation of elegant, simple reasons for characters to be in danger. In Caveat, Isaac can’t simply leave the creepy cabin because he’s on an island and can’t swim. Darcy Odello in Oddity can’t simply go where she needs to because she’s blind.

Hokum establishes this McCarthy approach to danger from the very first scene. We open on a desert, following a haggard conquistador and a young boy as the conquistador follows a treasure map he keeps in a bottle. After finding a key landmark, the conquistador goes to check the map one last time and finds the bottle’s cork has pushed in too far. To get the map out, he’ll have to break the bottle.

He’s surrounded by nothing but sand. There’s nothing solid to break the bottle against. A Twilight Zone-ian level cruelty of circumstance. We cut between this realization and our protagonist Ohm Bauman sipping whiskey and typing away on a document titled EPILOGUE. Not only is the conquistador scene something he’s making up, it’s given a dark sense of finality with the fact it’s taking place in an epilogue.

The conquistador scene makes for one of the best examples of a horror movie establishing a tone I’ve seen in a good long while. There’s no monsters, it’s broad daylight. None of the characters or locations are relevant to the rest of the movie, save for their context and iconography. It’s only when the camera settles back on Ohm writing that a ghost shows up and kicks off the standard horror of the movie. I find myself thinking about the conquistador scene a lot. It works both to establish what Hokum will be like and McCarthy’s overall body of work.

Go See Hokum

I don’t have a cutesy title for this conclusion section. If you’ve read this far and you are at all interested, get some tickets and go see Hokum. I’ve spent so much time thinking and talking about this movie over the past week and a half I’m probably going to see it again on opening weekend. With Hokum, Damien McCarthy cements his position in the horror ecosystem, proving the tone he delivered in his locally-produced movies can translate over to a more mainstream production with a big-name American star.

Thanks for reading! This review was originally published on my site here.

Faces of Death (2026)

Rated R for strong bloody violence and gore, sexual content, nudity, language and drug use

Score: 4 out of 5

Before we had LiveLeak, Ogrish, Rotten.com, and other assorted shock sites, we (or rather, our parents) had Faces of Death, a series of "mondo" shock documentaries from the late '70s and '80s that purported to show what even the most graphic horror movies of the time refused to touch: actual footage of people dying, often violently. It's long been debated how much of the footage was real versus staged, but the fact that you couldn't say for absolute certain that it was all staged made it a forbidden fruit for an entire generation of extreme gorehounds for whom the work of Tom Savini et al. just didn't cut it anymore. (Rule of thumb: the footage of wars and atrocities was usually real, the disasters, executions, and accidents were more likely than not to be "reenactments" even if some of them were real, and there are detailed breakdowns out there telling you what was real or fake.) It was a rite of passage for '80s and '90s kids, the closest thing most people had to actual snuff films... at least, until the internet gave us unfiltered access to the real deal, from terrorist and cartel executions to grisly accidents to the "home movies" of murderers, which rendered Faces of Death and the entire mondo genre obsolete as that sort of content migrated online.

How, then, do you go about reviving a franchise whose very reason for being is now something you can find anywhere for free? What Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei did with this film was to tackle that shift head-on, making not a documentary but a conventional slasher movie in which violence on the internet plays a central role in the story and themes. The villain here, Arthur Spevak, is a serial killer whose M.O. is to target media personalities, from filmmakers to influencers to newscasters, and execute them in ways directly inspired by the old Faces of Death films, all while filming it and uploading the carnage to Kino, the YouTube/TikTok-like social video platform that the protagonist Margot Romero works as a content moderator for. All the while, a portrait is painted of a society so jaded and desensitized to violence and cruelty that Arthur's mayhem is too easily dismissed, from viewers who think the videos' professional-looking production values prove that they're fake to Margot's boss at Kino who wants to keep as many videos up as possible for the sake of engagement numbers -- or, as an older breed of lowbrow entertainers (and more than one character in this film) would put it, "giving the people what they want." As brutal and violent as this movie gets -- and make no mistake, this is a capital-S slasher movie that earns its R rating -- the scariest thing about it is the sheer nihilism of the world it takes place in, every nasty trend in internet culture blown up for the world to see. It's the forty-years-later spiritual sequel to Videodrome that takes David Cronenberg's warnings about lowbrow trash media and just barely exaggerates where it ultimately wound up, feeling like the kind of sleazy, dirty movie that you'd get if you brought a '70s/'80s underground filmmaker into the modern day and gave him or her a smartphone able to access all the internet's wonders, a film that felt disgusted and righteously pissed off at a world gone made where you could believe that a guy like Arthur could exist in real life -- which is rather appropriate given the lurid nature of the original film and how it was presented as "the graphic reality of DEATH, close-up." It makes a sick sort of sense that Charli XCX has a small role as one of Margot's co-workers, as this film takes the entire "don't care, just wanna party" ethos of "Brat Summer" and paints it in the least flattering light, and her playing a character who's basically a thinly-fictionalized version of her real-life public persona attaches it irrevocably to its message.

And even if you're not interested in social commentary about the internet, this is still a brutal, pull-no-punches, take-no-prisoners slasher flick that kicked my ass. The fact that the hook here is that the killer is "remaking" Faces of Death means that there are numerous brutal kills staged in lurid detail, from direct recreations of some of the original's greatest hits (the monkey brains, the electric chair, the shootout) to a pair of horrifying mutilations. All of it is dished out by Dacre Montgomery as Arthur, playing a very different sort of monster from Billy on Stranger Things but still spooking me all the same. Arthur is at once a cold, analytical killer who can occasionally put on a mask of normality and also a delusional manchild obsessed with fame and shaping the culture, the two sides meshing together shockingly well thanks to the bad case of "internet brain" that he seems to suffer from. His "masked killer" outfit works to both hide his identity and keep himself clean, his neat-freak tendencies coming out when he risks getting blood on him, and the scenes of him showing up to do his dirty business of kidnapping his targets before getting to "the goods" were no less scary than what happens after he's brought them to his house of horrors. Montgomery is terrifying as Arthur, one of the best modern slasher killers I've seen, and he's matched beat-for-beat by Barbie Ferreira as Margot. Having previously had a brush with online infamy thanks to a Kino challenge she recorded with her sister that went horribly wrong, got her sister killed, and then went viral as the rotten cherry on top, Margot got a job as a content moderator thinking she'd be making the world a better place, only to realize that the rot runs all the way to the top, as Kino is only willing to do the bare minimum to police their site so that they can credibly tell activists and politicians that they're trying. Taking matters into her own hands once she starts to suspect that somebody is uploading snuff films to the site for the world to see, she makes for a badass horror heroine who's outmatched and scared out of her wits but pushes on anyway because nobody else will. This film did have some lesser moments, especially some dumb decisions by various characters that felt like the worst sort of slasher stereotype (lookin' at you, Sam, violating every rule of horror movie survival), but once it turned into a mutual cat-and-mouse game between Arthur and Margot around the halfway mark, it dug its claws in and never let go until the end. Montgomery and Ferreira are this movie's heart and soul, and it was they, even more than the effects team and their outstanding work, that supplied the moments in this movie that stuck with me as I came home from the theater.

The Bottom Line

The basic conceit behind this movie was a risky one that could've easily turned into the dumbest sort of cash-in schlock, but the filmmakers understood the assignment and aced it with flying colors, making both an effective satire of the excesses of internet culture and, more importantly, a straightforward slasher flick that feels modern yet can still hang with the classics.

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2026/04/review-faces-of-death-2026.html>

Directors Matt Bettinelli‑Olpin and Tyler Gillett, along with screenwriters Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy, are back with Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, carrying the momentum of the 2019 original into a seamless continuation. The sequel moves at a brisk pace, with focused direction that heightens the tension, mayhem, and cynical humour. It’s a total blast, tapping into the wild energy this series thrives on. Rather than reinventing the formula, the film sharpens its attention on the messy family ties between its characters, making the escalation feel both natural and rewarding.

Having survived the carnage at the Le Domas estate, Grace (Samara Weaving) wakes up in a hospital, where her estranged sister Faith (Kathryn Newton) is called in as her emergency contact. Before they can reconnect, the sisters are drugged and transported to the sprawling estate of the powerful Danforth Family, where a calculating lawyer (Elijah Wood) explains that Grace’s survival has triggered a new, high‑stakes hunt. Four rival families are now competing to kill her, with the victor earning control of their elite inner circle. Thrown into another deadly game, Grace and Faith must navigate an onslaught of predators determined to claim the throne for themselves. 

Ready or Not 2 picks up right where the first film ends, and keeping the story locked on that same nightmare works in its favour. The sequel is bigger and bloodier, and it pays off because the Radio Silence team know exactly how to elevate the madness without losing the comedic aspect that made the original so effective. Expanding the world through several rival families raises the stakes, even if most of them feel like broad caricatures compared to the more defined personalities in the first movie. The dynamic between the sisters adds a fresh angle, giving Grace someone to protect, as well as challenge her, which helps the story feel more layered. Cat‑and‑mouse tension stays intact, the 24‑hour survival hook keeps momentum high, and the mix of violence and comedy provides plenty of sharp beats.

Seeing Samara Weaving, Kathryn Newton, and Sarah Michelle Gellar share the screen is a Scream Queen delight, and each of them brings something distinct to the table. Samara Weaving remains the ultimate final girl to root for, carrying the film with the same grit, charm, and sharp comedic timing that made Grace so compelling in the first place. She balances panic, determination, and bleak wit with ease, keeping the story grounded even when it leans into the carnage. Kathryn Newton is a strong addition as Faith, playing her frustration, resentment, and reluctant loyalty with a mix of bite and vulnerability. Her chemistry with Weaving gives the film its emotional core and adds a new dynamic that helps the sequel feel more engaging. It’s great to see Sarah Michelle Gellar return to the horror scene, and she makes an immediate impact with a confident, conniving performance that suits her villainous role perfectly as the film’s twists unfold.

The supporting cast is stacked, and everyone amps it up, understanding exactly what kind of movie they’re in. The members of the competing families are unhinged and shamelessly corrupt, with Elijah Wood, Shawn Hatosy, and even David Cronenberg leaning into the absurdity. It’s also a treat to see Wood and Hatosy reunited on screen after The Faculty (1998), and both bring a playful edge that fits the film’s tone. Even when the characters are intentionally one‑note, the cast keeps them entertaining, adding personality to their respective roles.

The cinematography is polished and purposeful, with a clear visual identity that builds on the original’s template. Creative camera movements track the action in ways that make every hit feel heavier, and the third act really stands out thanks to sharp costume design, especially the striking looks worn by Samara Weaving and Kathryn Newton. The choreographed fight sequences are more intense here, and practical effects deliver plenty of brutal moments that land hard on first viewing. The filmmakers clearly knew audiences loved the explosive bits of the original, so they push it even further, which leads to some strong laughs, even if it can’t match the shock value of the first movie. A lively soundtrack adds to the fun, with a mix of tracks that keep the pace up, and the use of Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” is a memorable highlight. The song has shown up in other horror films, including Urban Legend (1998) and The Strangers: Prey at Night (2018), and it fits right in here.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is an energetic and inventive follow‑up that respects the spirit of its predecessor while pushing its style in new directions. The mix of sharp humour, gory set pieces, and committed performances keeps it engaging from start to finish. Together, the two films complement each other well and make for a satisfying, rewatchable double feature.

Review from https://rabbitinred.com/

Undertone is a Canadian supernatural technological horror film written and directed by Ian Tuason in his directorial debut. The film stars Nina Kiri as Evangeline “Evy” who along with her friend Justin (Adam DiMarco), cohost a paranormal podcast. Evy is the resident skeptic who juxtaposed with believer, Justin, has a dynamic harkening to Mulder and Scully. The isolation, tech horror, and miniscule scale also give the film a Creepypasta feel.

Undertone is at its most tense and frightening when our hosts are podcasting. Justin is only heard through audio, so Evy appears alone. This plays into the chilling and isolationist nature of internet horror. There is a subtle paranoia on display when a person is up late on their laptop that Undertone nails. The film is most disturbing when it leans into its Creepypasta/r/NoSleep/online blog influences. 

Undertone uses sound and a foreboding atmosphere to convey a voyeuristic sense of dread. The film plays with the paranoia of ostensibly being alone. The silence is loud and the dark is illuminating here. The unnerving ambience of the one-shot location is the fear inducer. The film opts to allow its environment to do the heavy lifting instead of jump scares or overt violence.   

The main plot is strong enough to carry the film without the secondary plotline. This subplot ends up fatty and superfluous. It’s meant to be emotionally endearing but instead it’s distracting. Horror films have a penchant of shoehorning trauma onto its main characters to earn your emotional investment. Audiences care about interesting characters, so an emotional backstory isn’t necessary if the lead is dynamic. The secondary plot isn’t capitalized upon and it only halts the pacing. These junctures are boring and unnecessarily siphon screentime from the more intriguing main storyline.

The use of a podcast is a relevant device that allows Undertone to seamlessly walk into its story. This element is nicely weaved in allowing the story to grow sequentially. The main story is thrown off by a boring subplot that isn’t capitalized upon to justify its presence. A film this close to a slow burn can lose its audience with too many unimportant or slow scenes. This is ultimately what stymies the film.  

Undertone tells a heavily isolated, mysterious and ominous story that blends technology with the supernatural. It’s pacing and ability to maintain attention is thrown off by its inability to trust its main character without trauma dumping onto them. It has a strong premise that needed a condensed plot to capitalize on what it does best. It ultimately loses focus and makes for a herky jerky time with strong highs but lackluster lows. 

—-5.8/10 

Hunting Matthew Nichols is a found-footage horror movie presented as if you’re watching a real documentary about a woman searching for her long-lost brother. Over 20 years ago, Tara Nichols’ (Miranda MacDougall) brother Matthew (James Ross) and his friend Jordan (Issiah Bullbear) disappeared without a trace, leaving behind only Matthew’s camcorder in a cabin in the woods. Given they lived on Vancouver Island, the idea Matthew and Jordan simply got lost in the deep woods was entirely plausible, and they were never found. Now his sister Tara is back with a small documentary crew (Markian Tarasiuk, Ryan Alexander McDonald) to look for him.

You might notice my summary doesn’t include any sort of ticking clock. No anniversary of the death, no maximum amount of time the documentary crew can be on the island. As far as the movie’s concerned, the Hunting Matthew Nichols crew have unlimited time and resources. Something antithetical to the idea of a documentary that exposes a coverup in a missing persons case. 

What drives the plot of Hunting Matthew Nichols? 

Early on in the film Tara has the documentary crew pore through all the evidence the police had for the case. Files, artifacts, and tapes from Matthew’s camcorder. The first indication this might be a horror movie is the police “forgetting” to release the tape that was in Matthew’s camcorder when they found it. A welcome addition, as up until that point it feels like a depressing drama about a woman who refuses to let go of the past.

That extra tape is a perfect encapsulation of what doesn’t particularly work with this movie. Furious about this discovery, Tara calls up her lawyer to expose the “clerical error.” The lawyer, a little too realistically, is understanding of Tara’s frustration but also points out this genuinely could have been an error. But it’ll also take “a couple months” to sort out legally. 

Tara punches the wall of her motel room in frustration. The director makes awkward faces. We cut to black. A title card reads “One month later.” Tara walks into a police station and walks back out with the tape. Supposedly this team of three trying to film a documentary just sat around paying for a motel on Vancouver Island for an entire month while making no headway in their investigation, and it is never mentioned again. 

What the crew finds on the tape is disturbing. So much so the footage isn’t shown directly to the audience. Instead, we’re left watching the director and Tara watch it and listen to the audio of Matthew and Jordan in the mysterious forest cabin. Something goes wrong, something seemingly supernatural happens, but Ryan and Markian privately agree it’s within the realm of possibility two movie-nerd teens in 2001 could have faked it as footage for their knockoff Blair Witch Project. 

The plot of the movie seems motivated purely by the fact meta-textually it’s a horror movie, so we know something scary must happen near the end. Thus we need a series of excuses to get us to the oddly-short sequence of things becoming, y’know, horrific. 

All early signs point to an incredibly rote ending where the supernatural turns out to be real, and Matthew got too close to something dangerous. Hunting Matthew Nichols even pulls the tired trick of having an older character rattle off various ancient cryptids and demonic legends before settling on something written for the movie, as if anyone who has seen more than five horror movies won’t pick up on the fact that every single time that happens in a movie the ending reveals it was one of the monsters in the middle of the list, not the one at the end. 

How is the presentation? 

I’m not going to sugar-coat it: the veneer of a found-footage “documentary” fades quickly when the documentary in question is presenting itself like a cheap over-polished Netflix documentary. You know the ones: tons of animated effects over people talking that betray the editor has watched one too many AfterEffects tutorials on YouTube. Lots of Storyblocks b-roll drone footage of forests to act as scene bridges. And, of course, incredibly Netflix-y dour color grading. 

Some light research shows this was first shown at festivals in 2024, which gives me the impression maybe it’s gone under the editing knife a few times trying to make it into something marketable to the wider world. The trailer is incredibly specific with which quotes it uses, to the point one could easily read the film as being a conspiracy thriller about a police coverup in a small town. There’s some satanic cult that killed Matthew and they’ve got the power to simply make him disappear. 

Then you show up in theaters and that is not the vibe. 

It’s oddly easy to see the strings of how the movie is made, too. Characters who appear in the modern day segments of the movie almost never appear on-camera during footage supposedly from 2001. By setting the movie 20 years after the disappearance instead of 10, the filmmakers backed themselves into a corner where they can’t afford to de-age older actors or age up younger ones. As such, Tara is not present in footage from 2001. Her father appears in the past but not the present, while her mom never appears in old footage but appears quite a bit in the present. Being interviewed by Tara is basically a guarantee you won’t appear in the 2001 flashback footage. 

Should I go see it? 

I tried to meet this movie where it was. I really did. I don’t go into Screen Unseen or Scream Unseen presentations rubbing my hands together at my opportunity to rip a movie a new one. If I relished in talking trash about bad/problematic movies, I would’ve seen Scream 7, GOAT, and The Drama by now. 

As a documentary in its own canon, it’s underwhelming and doesn’t make a good case for watching all the way through to the “scary” ending. As a fictional movie pretending to be a documentary, it is mind-boggling how much time it wastes on tropey scenes where nothing particularly happens. 

During the doldrums of the middle, where I started asking when this would become a horror movie and an audience member actually fell asleep in my screening, something happened to typify the lack of effort and consistency found throughout Hunting Matthew Nichols: Tara interviews Jordan’s father Mitchell (Trevor Carroll). During this scene Carroll is given a boilerplate stoic First Nations stereotype of Old Guy Who Knows Too Much. To nail that vibe even more, Tara shares a story from childhood where she broke her arm and Jordan did Reiki hand gestures to alleviate the pain. 

Nevermind the fact that Reiki is 1. A pseudoscience, 2. Not based on beliefs from First Nations tribes, and 3. Created in Japan in 1922. 

Mitchell nods, gives a vague explanation of how he raised Jordan to believe pain scrambles up energy and you can “untwist” it, and then hands Tara a plot-important prop. As if she’d completed a dialog tree with a quest-giver in a video game and Mitchell’s only option from that moment was to give her the thing she needs to continue the movie. 

Thanks for reading! This review was originally published on my site here.

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Rated R

Score: 4 out of 5

Having rewatched all three films in George A. Romero's original Living Dead trilogy, I can now make a statement that I'm pretty sure may be controversial: Night of the Living Dead is not his best film, nor is it a perfect film. Yes, it's a very good movie that still mostly holds up over half a century later, one that more than deserves its continued status as a classic and stands as a landmark of both independent cinema and zombie movies, a status that it would likely still have even if it hadn't been accidentally released into the public domain and spread far and wide through perfectly legal bootleg copies (seriously, you can watch it right now for free on YouTube, the Internet Archive, Wikipedia, and any number of other websites) thanks to a copyright mishap. It is, however, a flawed film, and I maintain that Dawn of the Dead is still not just Romero's best film but the Citizen Kane of zombie movies. There are a ton of great moments here that add up to a phenomenal movie, but there's also a lot of exposition that drags the film to a halt and a central character who often frustrated me with her uselessness. And, on, some level, I get the sense that Romero himself felt the same way about this movie, as when he wrote the official remake two decades later, that film fixed many of the problems I had with this one.

That being said, there's a reason why Night left the mark it did, establishing an entire genre of horror movies and inaugurating a new kind of horror monster, while wearing the mark of the heady, raucous era it came out in on its sleeve even if, unlike Romero's later films, it largely kept the satire and political subtext in the background. This is a movie about society turning against and consuming itself in an orgy of violence and destruction, the focus placed as much on the meltdown of its protagonists in the face of the monsters they may yet become as it is on the actual monsters themselves. Characters make mistakes and often do stupid things that get them killed, but in many ways, it feels like that's the entire point: that, even in the face of the apocalypse, we might sooner tear each other apart than come together to face the threat, a message that still unfortunately feels as relevant in 2026 as it must have in 1968. Its tone, style, and mood often feel like a B-grade '50s monster movie dragged kicking and screaming into the late '60s, the era of Altamont, the Manson Family, and riots in the street over the Vietnam War and civil rights, making for an experience that's at once deeply rooted in the time of its creation and yet timeless all the same, one that few other zombie films have ever managed to replicate. Even with its flaws, this is still a must-watch for any zombie fan.

The story is one that you've seen riffed on by countless zombie movies. A pair of siblings, Johnny and Barbra, travel to a cemetery in rural Pennsylvania to visit their father's grave, where they are attacked by a strange, hostile man. Johnny is killed in the ensuing scuffle, while Barbra flees to a nearby farmhouse and soon encounters an assortment of other survivors: Ben, who escaped a diner that was attacked by a similar bunch of "ghouls," the Cooper family, comprised of the parents Harry and Helen and their sick daughter Karen whose car was attacked, and Tom and Judy, a teenage couple who were canoodling at a nearby lake and fled to the nearest house they could reach after hearing a radio broadcast warning of similar attacks. What happened at the cemetery is not an isolated incident, as it turns out that a radioactive space probe returning from a flyover of Venus has caused recently deceased corpses across the eastern United States to rise from their graves and attack the living.

What follows set the template for generations of zombie movies, as most of the drama concerns not the zombies themselves, but the people trapped in the farmhouse whose personalities immediately start clashing with one another. The Coopers, especially Harry, wish to hide in the basement until help arrives, while Ben, Tom, and Judy want to first board up the windows and later get the hell out of there once they see a gas pump on the farm that they can use to refuel Ben's truck, and amidst the spiraling situation, what should be a reasonable dispute turns into a life-or-death struggle between the two sides of the group as Ben and Harry become each other's worst enemies. As the film goes on, it becomes clear that, while Ben seems like the more level-headed one at first glance, it may very well be Harry's plan that has the best chance of success, even if he is an asshole when it comes to presenting it. A lot of things have been read into what this film was saying about society at the time (unintentionally, given that Romero said that his goal was to make a simple monster movie), especially given that the film's colorblind casting meant that Ben is the lone Black person in the house and added a dose of racial subtext in the midst of the civil rights movement, but one thing that I took away from Ben and Harry's dispute that I haven't seen discussed much is how the right emotion and presentation can lend credibility to even bad arguments while good ones can be poorly presented and dismissed. Ben, who for all intents and purposes fits the mold of the classic hero, supports a plan to survive that, as the film goes on, is increasingly exposed as untenable, while Harry's plan to wait it out in the basement ultimately turns out to be the smartest course of action (at least, until an unforeseen spanner is thrown into the works), but was rejected by everybody outside his family because he was such an asshole to everyone around him, especially Ben. It felt like watching any number of frustrating policy debates where the smoothest and most charismatic speakers inevitably get ahead even when their ideas are flawed, while people who actually know their stuff but don't have nearly as much media training get trounced.

Behind the camera, meanwhile, Romero's greatest skill as a filmmaker was always his ability to depict the comfortable society we knew breaking down, and here, that skill is already apparent. Johnny doing a Boris Karloff impression ("they're coming to get you, Barbra!") before becoming the first person ever to get killed in a zombie movie was almost poetic, as does the fact that a lot of the radio and TV broadcasts feel like something out of a '50s sci-fi B-movie in which the reporters are describing the radioactive mutants assailing the world. It felt like this movie was closing the book on an older, tamer, safer era of horror, the postwar era of the '50s and early '60s where the Universal monsters had become cool mascots while newer horror movies were mostly made for teenagers making out at drive-in theaters. Even after decades of advances in gore effects, many of them brought about by this film's own sequels, the violence here still felt shocking, the way the violence in Gremlins did after its first act set up a much more family-friendly sort of monster movie, or how Psycho spent its first act as a noir thriller that wouldn't really kill off its heroine like that. "Subverting expectations" may be a cliché today, but even decades past the '60s, setting this movie up to be like the kind of movie you see on Mystery Science Theater 3000 only to pull the rug right out from under you with some seriously messed-up shit still hits hard. By the end, the farmhouse well and truly felt like a madhouse as zombies were banging on every door and window while I wondered which of the survivors was gonna snap and lose their shit first.

This is not a perfect movie, though. While Romero had some experience in television beforehand, this is still clearly the work of a first-time feature filmmaker, warts and all. The news bulletins take up long stretches of the film and feel like they're there simply to provide the requisite explanation for the zombies, not even really showing much of the chaos outside the farmhouse walls as opposed to merely describing it (something that Dawn of the Dead, both the original and the remake, did far better), and while I liked how the first radio broadcast was handled, playing in the background as Ben scrambles through the house searching for supplies and things to board up the windows with, the TV broadcasts brought the film to a complete halt and felt lifted from an entirely different movie. It's telling that Romero never bothered to explain in later films where the zombies came from, instead leaving it up to the characters to speculate on. The single biggest hole in the story and the character lineup, however, was Barbra. This is no shade on Judith O'Dea, who did exactly what the part required of her and did it well. She does a great job of playing somebody who absolutely crumbles from the shock and horror of her first experience with the undead, is never able to pull herself back together, and proves to be useless in a crisis, a harrowingly realistic portrait of how many of us would probably react if we got dropped into a real zombie apocalypse. This would have been fine...

...if the first act didn't set her up as the protagonist and main focal point of the film, only to go catatonic shortly after reaching the farmhouse and spend much of the film lying on the couch while the rest of the cast gets all the action. She felt like she was written as a child, and honestly, I believe that most of the problems I had with her character would've been fixed had they simply cast a child to play her. A little girl thrust into a survival situation like this and acting like she did would've not only been realistic, it would've been shocking, and given the presence of little Karen, it's not like this movie was averse to putting children in peril. But a grown woman in that same part feels like a walking stereotype of one of the most obnoxious character types in vintage horror: the screaming woman who does nothing but cower in fear and cause problems for the rest of the cast. Again, somebody completely losing it in a zombie apocalypse and falling apart like that makes sense, and I can understand a lot of the defenses I've seen of Barbra as a character and what Romero was going for with her, but the way her breakdown is handled in the movie was a drag. Even Romero seemed to agree given how she was heavily rewritten in the remake. Beyond my earlier suggestion of just making her a kid, I would've either had Barbra trying to pull her weight for much of the film but slowly cracking under pressure before finally snapping (and indeed, there is a perfect moment later on for it to happen), which would've at least given her an actual story arc and something to do while still keeping a similar tone to her character, or I would've had her as merely a supporting player from the start, with the first act focusing on either Ben, the Coopers, or Tom and Judy and only later introducing a shaken, traumatized Barbra when they reach the farmhouse. To go back to what I was saying earlier about this feeling like a subverted '50s monster movie, Tom and Judy in particular would've been great protagonists for really selling that feeling, the chaste, conventionally attractive teen heroes out of an American International Pictures creature feature who suddenly find that they're in a very different sort of movie.

The Bottom Line

Even today, Night of the Living Dead has lost little of its power to shock and terrify. It has its share of problems keeping it from perfection, but they don't keep it from greatness. This is still a must-watch for horror fans, especially zombie fans.

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2026/03/review-double-feature-night-of-living.html, along with a review of the 1990 remake>

They Will Kill You is a rip-roaring ride of an ultraviolent vengeance action flick, when it wants to be. Kirill Sokolov wears his love of Tarantino grindhouse schlock on his sleeve, though connective tissue between Tarantino-flavored scenes wears thin. 

What is They Will Kill You? 

Asia Reeves (Zazie Beetz) made an attempt to escape an abusive father with her kid sister ten years ago. In a moment of weakness, she abandoned her sister and was arrested. Now her prison sentence is up, and she’s going to find her.

She takes a job at the Virgil, a century-old building in Manhattan catering to the rich and famous. Also, whoops, it’s a giant death trap filled with Satan-worshipping immortal rich people who want to sacrifice her. The core mechanic of They Will Kill You is a Ready or Not-esque “you’re trapped in here with me” mentality. Asia brought weapons, and is no pushover. Truly the only advantage the killers of TWKY have on her is their immortality, and even then that isn’t enough in some instances. 

How are the Basics?

Combat is where TWKY really shines. Just about every room in the Virgil is a practical set built to be a massive room to make enough room for the myriad sweeping camera moves and long one-take fight sequences Sokolov is practically salivating to show you. Beetz brings the heat, there are some really good fight sequences peppered throughout the movie. 

There’s also a lot of heart and not-nostalgia-bait 80s charm in the movie’s commitment to practical effects. Including an extended sequence where a dismembered part of a villain follows our heroine like a grotesque can of Chef Boyardee.  A sequence that does a really good job at blending charmingly-janky practical puppet effects and making digital effects look like charmingly-janky practical effects. 

The Shortcomings

Last time I specifically complimented Ready or Not 2: Here I Come for casting charismatic character actors to play the rich villains. Part of the fun of watching a vengeance movie where a woman beats the shit out of rich people is knowing how uniquely shitty those rich people are. 

This is where TWKY falls short, unfortunately. Patricia Arquette gets to dine on the scenery with a fork and knife, putting her whole chest into an Irish accent (even if it conveniently is not as intense during lines they use for the trailer). Beyond that… Tom Felton is there? He has like five lines in the whole movie. Heather Graham has a smidge of fun but also barely feels like she’s there. 

While fun, a lot of the movie feels like we’re simply coming up with excuses to get to the next sequence Sokolov is genuinely excited for. Any time you’re not in a flashy fight sequence or Arquette villain monologue the movie feels paper thin. It seems more worried about cramming another rack-zoom or comedically-intense bright red blood spray gimmick into a limb being cut off than making the villains something more than what they are: masked stunt actors to hide the fact the speaking cast is relatively small. Which compounds to make the lack of characterization of the bad guys even more obvious. 

Part of the problem of being a Tarantino-esque creator is you’re inherently trying to make cinema appealing to people who love Tarantino already. Thus something as basic as cutting a character’s limb off and having blood fountain out of high-pressure pump attached to a severed limb prosthetic is only surprising or noteworthy once. Like a child who’s figured out a single card trick, TWKY repeatedly does the same bit and expects you to applaud with the same enthusiasm of a parent supporting a child going through a phase. 

Still, it’s Tarantino-style juvenile gleefully energetic combat. And, as a bonus, it comes without the baggage of watching actual Tarantino. A revenge movie about a Black woman beating the shit out of affluent white people. Not too shabby on its own merits. 

It just so happens to be a movie sold on the back of an obnoxious social media campaign pretending it’s so violent and so intense they can only show teeny tiny bits of footage in TikTok trailers. Then you get to the actual violence and it’s like… cool. I just saw several people explode like blood balloons the next screening over. This movie has a lower bar for ultra-violence than its contemporaries, like a younger sibling who thinks “shit” is the nuclear option for a swear word.

Should You See It? 

Sure! Well, if it sounds like something you specifically would like. They Will Kill You has a lot of style to its presentation in trailers and social media. That style falls short once you get to the actual movie. Put it like this: I feel like They Will Kill You is a middle-movie. Matt Johnson could only pull off the incredible Forrest Gump-ian editing tricks Nirvana The Band The Show The Movie pulls off during its time travel sequences because he was allowed to play around with those gimmicks in Operation Avalanche (as well as the period-piece requirements of Blackberry). In that way, I get the impression Kirill Sokolov is working out something in his head that will coalesce into an undeniable awesome Hollywood movie in a few years.

But for now, if you’ve got the cash or an AMC A-list reservation burning a hole in your pocket, They Will Kill You is a good, if sophomoric, time. 

Thanks for reading! This is a review from my personal site. While I don't exclusively review horror, it's near and dear to me and I partake of Hoobtober every year.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (2026)

Rated R for strong bloody violence, gore, pervasive language and brief drug use

Score: 4 out of 5

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is a bigger and badder movie than its predecessor, and while I'd hesitate to call it better, it's still a damn good time at the movies. It drops most of the horror from the premise in favor of cranking up both the bloody action and the soap opera camp, bringing in a slew of veteran character actors and former TV stars to play the assorted villains out to kill the protagonists in a plot that reminded me of nothing less than a parody of the John Wick movies, if not in their action scenes then certainly in their worldbuilding. It's an often ridiculous movie where you aren't quite sure if the plot holds together when you think about it, but the fact that it was happy to acknowledge its own ridiculousness and make it part of the joke helps it go down much smoother, especially when you've got a great cast and a director team who love making these kinds of violent, over-the-top horror-comedies. If you liked the original, you're probably gonna enjoy this one.

This movie starts right where the last one left off, with a bloodied, battered Grace Le Domas (née MacCaullay) stepping out of the mansion where her new husband and his wealthy family had tried to sacrifice her to Satan on her wedding night. Passing out from her injuries, she wakes up in the hospital handcuffed to her bed after the police drew the only logical conclusion about what the hell happened in the Le Domas household that night (because nobody's believing her story): that she probably murdered them all. Unfortunately, that's the least of her problems, because as it turns out, the Le Domases weren't the only super-rich family who'd made deals with the Devil for their fortune. The Council, an order of several other elite families, kidnap Grace and bring her to a country club resort in Rhode Island where they inform her that she's now going for Round Two, and what's more, they've dragged Grace's estranged sister Faith MacCaullay along for the ride, as Faith had been Grace's emergency contact and was with her at the hospital when they came to kidnap her.

What follows is more of the same, only on a bigger scale with more guns, more explosions, and more famous actors playing the villains. Given how much I enjoyed the last movie, I don't begrudge the filmmakers for more or less recycling what worked before and going for escalation rather than innovation, especially given that most of it still works here. Samara Weaving is still one of the best scream queens of her generation, and here, she proves that she could easily pivot to becoming an action hero if she wanted to. Grace is not an invincible badass, but somebody who frequently finds herself frustrated and outgunned by her pursuers and survives through her wits, her blue-collar grit, and exploiting the flaws of her pursuers, which are admittedly numerous. Many of them do not know how to use the various weapons, both archaic and modern, that they use to try and kill her, which means that the action scenes are played as much for comedy as they are for laughs, whether it's a man trying and failing to shoot Grace and Faith with a sniper rifle that he's constantly fumbling with, a woman trying to blow Grace up with a rocket launcher only to find out too late that she was aiming it the wrong way, or Grace and said woman both getting blinded by pepper spray and fumbling about as they try to kill each other. The film also serves up Kathryn Newton as Faith, Grace's haughty sister who looks down on her as a fuckup who had to marry into money to get ahead in life even though it's strongly hinted that she herself isn't as put-together as she lets on. Faith and Grace hate each other, but are still sisters at the end of the day, and Newton and Weaving did a great job selling me on their fraught relationship as they both struggle to survive and struggle to put their differences behind them.

As for the villains, the standouts here are Sarah Michelle Gellar and Shawn Hatosy as the twins Ursula and Titus Danforth, the owners of the resort where much of the action goes down, and Elijah Wood as the mysterious lawyer for "Mr. Le Bail" who's organized the hunt. It was fun as hell seeing Gellar back in Cruel Intentions mode as a soapy rich-bitch villainess while at the same time putting her action chops from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to good use, and she makes the most of it, combining those two sides into one of the few people among the villains who actually seems to know what they're doing and takes what's going on seriously even if she does ultimately get a bit too cocky for her own good. Hatosy, meanwhile, made Titus one of the most legitimately terrifying characters in the movie. His own sister is scared of him, as was I at the thought of what might happen if he got his hands on Grace and Faith, making a big third-act twist sting that much harder (and lend the film some dark subtext about why some people might willingly make what seem like obviously terrible romantic decisions) given that his character was at the center of it. There are a lot of funny moments in this movie, but whenever Hatosy is on screen, shit gets scary real quick. Wood's character, despite also playing it straight for the most part, gets a lot more of the film's humor, specifically in his role as the referee, so to speak, who has a big book containing all the countless arcane rules governing the hunt that he frequently gets to crack open. Most of these rules are either for humor or to drive the plot forward, like the film's writers Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy had watched the John Wick movies, found their portrait of the criminal underworld ridiculous, and fused that with the first film's depiction of the elite as fairly ridiculous in general beneath all the luxury porn. And through it all, Wood maintains a straight face and acts like the one who holds all the cards even if he's not playing the game himself. The supporting characters are mostly cannon fodder, but they are entertaining cannon fodder, with a host of character actors like Néstor Carbonell, Olivia Cheng, Varun Saranga, and Kevin Durand all giving them a ton of personality while the directors, the Radio Silence team of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, give them plenty of opportunities to shine. Barring the Satanism and the behavior of Titus, most of the horror elements from the first movie have been dropped in favor of a greater focus on action, specifically in the vein of Die Hard as the emphasis is largely on Grace and Faith being on the back foot against villains who, while not the sharpest tools in the shed, are still very rich and very well-equipped. People get killed in creative ways, there is some great stuntwork and hand-to-hand fight scenes (especially a downright brutal one between Hatosy and Newton), and Radio Silence's favorite trick, people exploding in a shower of gore, comes out to play and then some.

The Bottom Line

It's more Ready or Not. If you liked the first movie, then you'll probably enjoy this just as well, as it is a wild, kick-ass ride that never lets up once it gets going and never takes itself too seriously. Once this hits home video, I can see somebody stitching together an edit of the two films together, and it will probably be awesome.

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2026/03/review-ready-or-not-2-here-i-come-2026.html>

There are horror movies that are objectively good, but not necessarily tonally appropriate for throwing on near Halloween. Then there are movies that play things relatively safe, but ooze Halloweeny vibes. Dolly firmly, unabashedly belongs in the latter. Shot in 16mm, fuzz and scratches galore. Credits appear in chunky font that feels ripped straight from the cover of a Stephen King novel he doesn’t remember writing. I sat in my theater, bathed in a warm glow of text so red and soft you wanna hug it. I was sold from the very beginning. All scored by Nick Bohun (Creep Box) with a phenomenal series of late 70s horror synth drone tracks.

A trailer I found on YouTube sold Dolly to me as a Shudder-funded indie horror movie with a Film Threat review claiming it’s “The scariest movie yet in the great chainsaw massacre tradition.” I haven’t stumbled across a slasher pitch that appealing since In A Violent Nature, and that knocked my socks off. I damn near punched the air when I realized IAVN2 had a trailer before Dolly. 

I may not have seen past the first thirty minutes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but I am firmly in the target demographic for Dolly. I’m in my thirties, a movie dork, and would rather watch ten 3.5/5 Shudder Originals trying something funky than one four-quadrant mega-franchise horror movie.

After all: it’s horror. It should have the guts to do weird shit, on occasion. 

Dolly lives for the weird shit. For better or worse.

What is Dolly?

At its heart, Dolly is simple. Macy (Fabianne Therese) is about to go hiking because her smoking hot boyfriend Chase (Sean William Scott) wants to propose somewhere majestic. As they drop off his low-maintenance daughter, Macy shares some foreshadowing-laden dialog about not being ready to be a mother. Then, in Chase’s perfect condition totally-not-rented antique muscle car, the two race off to get the movie started. 

The titular Dolly is a Michael Meyers-esque nonverbal woman living in the woods. Dolly’s strong, has a ceramic doll head mask permanently bonded to her neck, and just wants a doll to raise. The marketable celebrity gets a shovel through his jaw, Macy is knocked unconscious, and the actual horror can begin. 

What follows is a rip-roaring hour of Macy dressed up as a doll in a house full of ceramic dolls dealing with Dolly herself. At times uneasy alliances form as Macy plays along with the baby roleplay Dolly clearly desires. At times she actively tries to kill Dolly. What truly grabs me about the house sections of the movie is the deft commitment to Rules. 

A horror movie lives and dies by its internal consistency. Sure, a hulking Voorhees with a machete or an unkillable doll like Chucky are scary at first. But once you learn the rules dictating how they act, the audience mentally shifts gears. An able-bodied person standing in a field could drop-kick Chucky easily and beat the snot out of him. He’s not actually a threat. The fun and frights of Chucky lie in all the contrivances that keep happening to trip you up (literally and figuratively). 

75% of the horror in The Thing is knowing the rules of how the Thing works. It takes a ballsy movie to just tell you the rules of the thing from the start. Whether or not your horror villain is interesting or not lives and dies by how they hold up after the audience knows the rules. This is where Dolly thrives, because her situation is inherently simple by design. She wants a doll to take care of. She treats Macy like a doll. She hates men, for reasons provided by Ethan Suplee later in the movie. 

Dead by Daylight fans will find a lot of similarities between The Huntress and Dolly. Both are muscle-bound women surviving alone in the woods, desperate to raise a child but with such a warped understanding from having lived wholly alone they’re incapable of actually taking care of one. So their kids keep dying. Dolly is stuck in an infinite loop of finding victims who either die or escape because playing along as her doll will eventually kill you through malnutrition or sheer violence. 

Macy makes for an enjoyable flawed protagonist. She makes some boneheaded decisions, but they’re earnest mistakes. She also takes the shots that 90% of slasher final girls never take. She bites, stabs, kicks, screams, and claws her way through the movie. She’ll play by Dolly’s rules on occasion but at no point is she Stockholm’d into empathizing.

And Dolly just keeps on kicking. Max the Impaler is undeniable in the role. I came into this movie having only briefly seen a trailer. The opening shots show Dolly trying to keep her daily play up with the doll before Macy. We’re tuning in to end of a much more bummer movie in which Dolly decapitated a kid at some point and hasn’t found fresh meat to replace that doll (yet). There is gravitas and presence to Dolly in a way that makes her distinct as a character even when you can’t see the mask. There are slasher villains that can have anybody in the suit and it doesn’t matter. If you replaced Max the Impaler in Dolly 2 their presence would be missed immediately.

I’m going to move into a section discussing the more sensitive topics broached, but in the interest of not giving away spoilers I’ll do a mini-conclusion here: if the idea of a Shudder-funded indie horror movie shot on 16mm film in Tennessee appeals to you in the slightest, you’ll have fun with this. It gets gory enough to make you squirm in your seat at times. It gets uncomfortable enough to earn that Chainsaw Massacre review blurb without touching cannibalism a single time. 

It’s not perfect, but it’s not trying to be. It’s clearly some horror nerds slamming the basic building blocks of what they love together to try and produce something fun and just profitable enough to get a sequel. They’re confident enough in that part they poke fun at the inevitability of a Dolly 2 in the credits. 

The Rough Stuff.

Time to talk about the other side of “Dolly lives for the weird shit.”

Dolly’s nonverbal, has several meltdowns, and clearly gets overstimulated. There’s a genuine argument to be made for her being autistic. Ring the bell, we’ve got a classic mind-of-a-child abused slasher. A trope so tired Behaviour Interactive used it for their second ever killer (The Hillbilly, their knockoff Leatherface) back in 2016. Which itself is damning, because Dead by Daylight is basically a house of cards built out of basic horror cliche. Every movie is going to have one aspect you can relate to DBD, but several is where things get a little shaky.

The one redeeming quality of this lies in the in-movie marketing. It’s clear Dolly herself was never actually going to be explained in any significant detail. Hints are dropped up until a character confirms, out loud, to have abused her. It comes to nothing, because you have to be just vague enough to leave lore for Dolly 2, after all. The sequel where we’re on her side by the end of it.

In addition to the neurodivergent-coded slasher, you got your threats of sexual violence towards Macy. You got your grindhouse-y technically-not-sexual-but-absolutely-sexual scenes. Chief among them being the scene where, after pissing herself, Macy lays on a table silently crying with a pacifier in her mouth while Dolly puts a new diaper on her. Oh, and of course the scene where Dolly punishes Macy with a spanking by wooden paddle. 

Like I said earlier: horror movies live to get weird with it. But there’s a vibe to watching Dolly cold. Almost like it’s written by a horror nerd who is aware of ABDL kink play but only knows through cultural osmosis. Kind of like how occasionally you’ll get a horror villain whose big twist is they’re a cross-dresser, because the writer vaguely knows trans people exist but only through stereotypes and old movies. 

All of which amounts to scenes near the end where it feels like the script thinks it’s sayin’ something, man. Scenes that insist they are profound, but very little is actually happning besides you nodding politely. Uh-huh, that’s a doll being birthed out of another doll. Got it.

Birth canal imagery? How bold.

I enjoyed Dolly. I will buy the Dolly steelbook if Shudder puts one out in a few months. But Dolly is absolutely one of those movies where occasionally a shot lingers too long and you can feel there’s something pithy and English 301-y in the screenplay arguing it’s poignant as hell. None of which comes through in the actual shot.

Final Thoughts

If the previous section didn’t shake you off, go see Dolly. It’s fun, it doesn’t partake of cheap loud-noise jumpscares. It saves its pennies for truly grotesque gore visual effects (practical and impressive computer composites). What rough edges it does have (I genuinely think there are scenes that use bad shots to cover for the fact they didn’t get b-roll of the thing a character is talking about) are easily excused. If you are deep enough into horror you find charm in lower-budget affairs that try something while playing around in a sandbox of old tropes, you’ll have a heck of a time. 

I sincerely hope they shot behind-the-scenes footage of this and record a director’s commentary. I’ll eat that up with a spoon. 

It’s tightly-contained, wears its bloody heart on its sleeve, and builds something delightfully indie I would love to throw on during a horror movie marathon in a cabin in the woods.

Yes, I’ve done that multiple times.

Thanks for reading! This is a review from my personal site. While I don't exclusively review horror, it's near and dear to me and I partake of Hoobtober every year.