Category: Horror

WEAPONS

By Marc S. Sanders

The longevity of horror movies and the insatiable appetite that audiences hunger for hinges on curiosity.  Horror is other worldly or beyond commonplace.  It’s unrealized. Stories likely begin with the concept of a particularly unique, unheard of scenario.  

For example, one night in a small suburban neighborhood, what could explain why an entire classroom of elementary school students, taught by Ms. Gandy, leave their homes at exactly 2:17 in the morning, vanish into the darkness and never return? Could Ms. Gandy be behind this mystery?  Also, why is Alex the only student in the class to show up for school the next day?

Reader, the trailer for Weapons had me hooked.  The imagery showing the silhouettes of innocent children running into the darkness with their arms outstretched was eye opening.  A young girl narrates the brief camp fire ghost story in the preview. It also opens the film with additional details.  This set up seems odd and different.  Doesn’t sound like another vampire or zombie flick to me.  This was going to be something else.  Frankly, ahead of the release of Zach Cregger’s film, I could not stop thinking about it.  I needed to know the reason behind this phenomenon.  

Yet, anticipation and finally scratching that itch turned out to be disappointing.  

Cregger’s movie answers almost all the questions it offers even if some elements are not wholly consistent as the story unravels.  The only salvation to watching Weapons is not knowing why any of this happened, in particular with the squirrelly young teacher, Ms. Gandy (Julia Garner, whose career continues to impress) at the center of it all.  

Like most second rate horror films though, there are teases of drawn out scenes as you anticipate the next jump scare.  Loud knocking on a front door to motivate the protagonist to go “Helloooooo!!!! Anyone there?,” and then to open the door to an empty street is just as annoying. Especially, if nothing is ever explained of that sequence. Was this wedged into the final cut for another hair raising experience? The best horror has an explanation for EVERYTHING you see. However, I was waiting for a cat or a bird to jump into frame. It’s been done!

There are also the nightmare sequences.  Once again, I have been banged over the head with “It’s just a dream!”  This is such a desperate, last resort trope to stretch out a running time or make up for lost road in storytelling.  Can movies just stop with the “only a dream” sequence please?  Freddy Krueger is the only one who can legitimately lay claim to this tired idea.

While I may not care for the explanations of Cregger’s phenomena, at least I can compliment his skills as a filmmaker during the expository portion of his picture.  The writer/director provides an abundance of tracking shots through the hallways of the school, down neighborhood streets, in Ms. Gandy’s house, and even within the small confines of a liquor store.  

Much of his material is positioned behind his characters and he tracks where they are walking while being limited on showing their facial expressions.  Recently, I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious and the film initially only shows the back of Cary Grant’s head.  It works as a mysterious character device.  For the first twenty minutes of Weapons, we are primarily only seeing the back of Julia Garner’s head.  I was invested in this movie wondering what is it about this loner teacher who is being admonished as a witch within the community.  This movie is starting out with a modern day Salem. Ms. Gandy is weird and I desperately want to look her in the eye, but Cregger’s direction won’t let me.  So, I can’t get a grasp of this odd individual.  Well played.

The outline of Weapons works like Doug Lyman’s Go or a Quentin Tarantino film.  Cregger said he got inspiration from Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia.  The movie is divided into different perspectives of a collection of characters.  You see the teacher’s experience first, and then respectively of another student’s father (Josh Brolin), a cop (Alden Ehrenreich), a homeless meth addict, and the school principal (Benedict Wong).  Their stories eventually cross paths while more and more clues and answers gradually deliver.

What is surprising are the humorous beats that come out of some of the frightening moments of the picture.  The bonkers ending feels like a salute to a memorable scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.  What comedy derives from the dark elements though felt unwelcome to me.  For a horror picture with fascinating potential, the threats and whatever suspense that was to be expected suddenly feels watered down.  Now, Weapons feels like an uninspired episode of Tales From The Crypt or an exhausting and unnecessary two hour installment of Stranger Things.  This movie had its brains working overtime when it began and then lost its intelligence along the way.

Two characters in the script are given too much unwanted and uninteresting attention here.  When the film arrives at their perspectives, the picture meanderingly drags along offering little of anything substantial.  It felt like I walked into a different movie, far away from the spooky stuff that was eerily described in the beginning of the film.  More material could have been devoted to others in the town with a bigger and more personal stake in the central plot.  There are too many diversions of little significance.  Seventeen children disappeared and yet we only get to know one father and brush by another mom and dad. No one else is feeling the agony of this incident?

There are pertinent clues of simple logic that are overtly ignored as well so that the story can just simply move along.  Specific objects in Ms. Gandy’s classroom suddenly disappear and no one seems to question their absence while this case is being investigated.  Because it’s too apparent, you can’t help but dwell on this inconsistency.  If you’ve participated in an Escape Room, this bit of information will tediously occupy your mindset.  

Weapons has a marvelous idea, but it circumvents common elements of all horror movies too.  There’s a spooky house, nightmares, a haggardly weird old lady, knocks on the doors and lots of darkness too.  I don’t mind any of this.  What gnawed at me though was the simplicity of the answers to the riddles, and the enormous waste of veering off into several characters who bear little importance.

Someone should take this idea of children running away into the night and do it all over again.  I just love the idea. Other screenwriters would have written Zach Cregger’s story and then ripped the pages off their legal pad and tossed the crumpled balls of paper over the shoulder to start again. Cregger seems to have just settled on his first draft.

Weapons feels like a movie where the audience gets to experience a wrenching case of writer’s block, and nothing could be more frustrating.

BRING HER BACK (2025)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTORS: Danny Philippou & Michael Philippou
CAST: Billy Barratt, Sally Hawkins, Jonah Wren Phillips, Sora Wong
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 89% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A brother and sister uncover a terrifying ritual at the secluded home of their new foster mother.


Bring Her Back is a supremely disturbing modern horror film from the two directors of 2022’s celebrated debut film Talk to Me; it’s right up there with Hereditary [2018] and The Babadook [2014].  It brazenly opens with creepy black and white footage of…something…then appears to drop into “Lifetime-movie” mode, lulling us along until WHAM, something truly unbelievable occurs, and it’s just a roller-coaster ride the rest of the way.  It’s bloody ingenious.  (Emphasis on the “bloody.”)

Andy (Billy Barratt) and the visually-impaired Piper (Sora Wong) are step-siblings who experience an early tragedy, resulting in the two of them being assigned as foster children to Laura (Sally Hawkins), a single mother who has experienced a tragedy of her own.  Her child is Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), a 10-year-old boy who has been voluntarily mute since his sister, Laura’s daughter, drowned in their pool, now kept empty.

Ominous signs abound.  Laura’s house is completely encircled by a strip of white paint.  She locks Oliver in his room whenever she leaves the house.  At a funeral, Laura surreptitiously clips some hairs from the body in the casket.  Andy discovers he has started wetting the bed, but he’s 17 years old; Laura ascribes it to stress, but the real reason is far more…invasive.  And over everything is the mute Oliver, lurking in the background, occasionally banging on doors and windows, and more.

Another superb element to the story is the character of Piper, Andy’s visually-impaired sister.  I mention this because the filmmakers deliberately held a casting call for actual visually-impaired actresses, settling on the completely non-professional Sora Wong.  This aspect of her character is utilized to the hilt throughout the movie, in ways I can’t even hint at without spoiling any surprises.  (Okay, I’ll mention one moment…where she knows someone is front of her, feels their head, then turns and asks someone else, “Who is this?”  BRRRRR…)

When the Philippou brothers do drop the hammer and get started with the real horror elements, they do not hold back.  There are scenes here as terrifying and as off-putting (in a good way, I guess?) as anything in [insert your favorite horror film here].  There are images here that I will not soon forget.  In a perfect world, this movie would become so popular among horror fans that those scenes would become part of a pop-culture shorthand.  “The knife scene.”  “The table scene.”  “The Russian videos.”  “The ‘self-snacking’ shot.”

I initially had an issue with the very ending, which felt more, shall we say, heartfelt than the rest of the movie implied was coming.  However, I learn from IMDb that the Philippous had a much grander ending planned.  But everything changed when a close friend of theirs passed away unexpectedly during production; the film is dedicated to him in the closing credits.  Danny Philippou is quoted: “[The film’s ending] goes against the conventions a little bit, but it feels more true to life.”  Watch the film and judge for yourself if he’s right.  As for me, now that I know that piece of trivia, the film’s ending is easier for me to accept.

Here’s hoping that Bring Her Back becomes at least a cult classic.  For someone like me, who’s a bit picky with this genre, it’s an easy pick for a new movie to throw into my annual Halloween rotation.  I enjoyed the hell out of this movie.

SINNERS

By Marc S. Sanders

Ryan Coogler is one of the most inventive writer/directors working today.  This is a filmmaker who will assemble a hundred different ideas into one body of work. All of it makes sense when blended together.  A movie musical sourced in blues and grassroots instruments like banjo, piano, harmonica, foot stomping and guitar stitched together on to a horror film?  Once the wheels get turning, Coogler can’t see it any other way and so he lands upon October 15, 1932, one day and one very long night in Clarksdale, Mississippi where Sinners takes place. 

The smokestack twins – Smoke and his brother Stack – return from working with Al Capone in Chicago.  They’ve got lots of money and big plans to open up the Juke Joint when the sun sets.  Michael B Jordan plays the charming gentlemen. Smoke is donned in blue accents, while his brother Stack is identified primarily in red.  Jordan is such a skilled and aggressive actor in everything he does. I truly did not realize he was playing both roles until about a third of the way through the picture.  His performances are so tantalizingly unique and memorable that Jordan has to be a contender for an Oscar nomination.

The boys circumvent the Clarksdale area. First they purchase a barn and the land it dwells upon.  With their pistols at the ready, their purchasing agreement is that the seller’s Klan associates do not come around here.  They go to the train station to recruit Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) for the piano and harmonica.  Smoke visits Ruthie (Andrene Ward-Hammond) to prepare the most delicious crawfish and shrimp.  Ruthie is also the mother of Smoke’s deceased infant child and they need to catch up on some history that was not tied off.  Stack needs to contend with Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), his sultry lover from the past who was also left behind unexpectedly. 

Most impressive is a debut performance from Miles Caton as Sammie Moore, the local preacher’s son, and the kid who can strum a mean guitar in the back seat of a car or down at the joint.  Sammie looks up to the twins. They will show him how to carry himself.  There’s a history to everyone the men encounter.  Sometimes they are welcome.  Sometimes they’re not, like the Klan, and sometimes they’d rather avoid who they come across as they continue to spread the word about the Juke Joint celebration that’s too come with all the liquor, food, and music they can imagine. 

Michael B Jordan and Miles Caton are definitely Oscar worthy; two very hot properties.  Caton can do it all.  He can sing and act.  He’s as big a surprise as Mikey Madison was with Anora.  You can’t take your eyes off of him and if the guy goes on tour, I’m buying a ticket to see him. 

A prologue narration followed by a disturbing, eye-opening epilogue scene within a town church opens Sinners.  Something unfathomable must have happened at the Juke Joint on this particular night. 

I went into this film having not seen a trailer, a commercial or even reading an article about it.  I was not aware of the blazing bluegrass root music that populates this film, nor of the surprise monster fest that eventually takes overtakes the story.  It was a better viewing experience for me than I imagine had I known some of the details of Coogler’s film.  This gorgeous film accompanied by magnificent sound and visual details with award caliber editing and direction steers into so many different curveball surprises and genres.  Sinners is a film that you go see in the movie theater.  The Juke Joint alone is worth the price of admission.  As memorable a setting as Rick’s Place in Casablanca, the Cantina in Star Wars or Jack Rabbit Slim’s in Pulp Fiction. 

You read it here first!  The Juke Joint is sure to be a haunted house at Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights.  I promise you.

That being said, my love for the two-and-a-half-hour film dwindled during its last third when the monsters are revealed and the picture spirals into a blood fest battle between heroes and villains with spurting blood, fiery Molotov cocktails, guns and screaming and wrestling and chases upstairs and out the doors and off the balconies.  I’ve seen all of this a hundred times before and as well constructed as a film this is, nothing was surprising me anymore.  Nothing was giving me jump scares. 

For such an imaginative picture, the inventions went into neutral.  The dialogue starts to drain in lieu of schlock gore and the intelligence of this abundance of characters checks out at the door.  Some of what you see looks like material that could have been in Friday The 13th Part 14.  And, well, a lot of the material is a rehash of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s very proud B movie From Dusk Til Dawn.

Until the final act of Sinners, Ryan Coogler incorporates so much researched and genuine attention into this Jim Crow era film.  I read that while he was making the Creed and Black Panther films, he was feeling withdrawn after a favorite uncle passed away.  This uncle told stories of this Mississippi area, complete with a small immigration of Chinese populace.  Coogler capitalized on that idea and a well-drawn couple named Bo and Lisa Chow (Yao, Helena Hu) are weaved into this story to supply food and drink for the party that’s to come.  No one would ever question if these two were not part of this cast.  They could have been two black actors or even a pair of whites, but Coogler ensures additional flavors are worked into the film with the authenticity to back it.  These are not even walk on roles.  They own two different mercantile stores within the heart of town. 

The best idea to Sinners is when the music is most entertaining at the Juke.  Ryan Coogler has fun with the clay he infinitely molds.  A long Steadicam shot is the centerpiece of the film as it travels through the whole barn that has been transformed into the Joint.  Coogler seamlessly goes for an ethereal or maybe spiritual feel as the sweaty, sexy and rhythmic performers and their music blends into all kinds of jazz, rap and soul found within the future generations of this community.  A turntable scratcher is positioned next to an acoustic guitar player or a banjo, and as deliberately anachronistic as this seems for 1932, it all belongs together within this seasoned stew.

Outside the Juke Joint are the monsters priming for their own celebration to come with Celtic harmonies, clogging and river dancing to get their appetites drooling, literally drooling.  Two communities will clash and it will be for more than just than standard prejudices found along the cotton fields of Jim Crow Mississippi.

This was not an easy review to write.  I do not want to disclose the surprises and turns that Sinners takes.  As well, my experience with the film is a mixed bag.  There is so much new and fresh material found in Ryan Coogler’s picture, but there’s also a lot of staple work that’s all too familiar as well.  What I recognize is not the least bit surprising and it is frankly uninteresting to me.  Sinners needed the creation of a new kind of cinematic monster to uphold its inventions. 

Especially considering that the body horror film The Substance and Jordan Peele’s terrifyingly smart Get Out earned tons of accolades recently, it will not be a surprise if Sinners earns a lot of end-of-the-year nominations as well.  The direction, editing, art design and costume design are equally worthy of large appreciation.  Sinners has likely clinched a spot for Best Picture nomination.  Only the wrap up will deny itself of the trophy though. 

I must end with a long overdue BRAVO to horror.  Often the genre does not get deserved recognition, because so much of it runs on cheap gross out junk or jump scares with no sensible reasoning behind any of it.  Guys like Coogler and Peele are finally working on the braininess which can be found in this area of storytelling and craftmanship.  They know there are scarier things to imagine than a foreboding hockey mask. 

SINNERS (2025)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Ryan Coogler
CAST: Michael B. Jordan, Miles Caton, Delroy Lindo, Hailee Steinfeld, Wunmi Mosaku, Jack O’Connell
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 98% Certified Fresh

PLOT: Trying to leave their troubled lives behind, twin brothers return to their hometown to start again, only to discover that even greater troubles are waiting to welcome them back home.


“You keep dancin’ with the devil…one day he’s gonna follow you home.” – Jedidiah in Sinners

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners pulls one of the best head-fakes I’ve seen in a long time.  The initial trailers would have had you believe the film was basically a character study (albeit an intense one) of identical twin brothers trying to run an illegal business in 1932 Mississippi.  Since both brothers are being played by the excellent Michael B. Jordan, aided by a stellar supporting cast, I got the impression it would be a hybrid of Heat, The Cotton Club, and Michael Mann’s Public Enemies.

Sinners does cover much of that fertile ground…for its first half.  Read no further if you’ve been lucky enough not to have seen what the main attraction is, plot-wise, for the film.

We first get a prologue depicting a bloodied young black man bursting into a Sunday church service while holding the top half of a broken guitar neck.  This is Sammie Moore, played by Miles Caton in his film debut.  The rest of the film is a flashback to the previous day.

The Smokestack brothers have returned home.  Smoke and Stack are identical twins, although one of them (Smoke, I think?) has some visible gold in his smile, so that helps distinguish them from each other.  They are both sharply dressed, having returned from Chicago after working for Al Capone for a spell.  They plan to open a juke joint in a building they purchased from a smarmy character named Hogwood, a white man who grins and assures them they won’t have any trouble from the Klan ‘round here.

This whole first half of the movie is masterfully told.  We are presented with fully drawn characters, not generic placeholders to be shuffled randomly later on.  We find out that Sammie is cousin to Smoke and Stack.  We meet Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), a mixed-race woman who was left high and dry romantically when Smoke left for Chicago.  There’s Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), a nearly-ancient man who plays a mean blues harmonica, whom the brothers want to hire to play in their new joint.  There are the Asian owners of a grocery store, hired to cater their grand opening.

And then there’s actress Wunmi Mosaku, who gives a luminous, heartbreaking performance as Annie, a woman who bore Smoke a child that died as an infant.  One of the highlights of the film shows Smoke reconnecting with Annie in a scene that at first invites some crude jokes, but which later provides a deep emotional resonance in the movie’s closing passages.  I only remember Mosaku as a sizable presence in the one-and-done HBO series Lovecraft Country (2020), but she was also apparently in Deadpool and Wolverine (2024), so now I gotta go back and watch THAT again.  Twist my arm.

The movie plays more like a really good Stephen King novel than any other movie I can think of since Pan’s Labyrinth (2006).  The film’s canvas is painted beautifully and crisply, moving smartly without rushing.  I would hope Sinners gets nominated for its film editing (provided by Michael P. Shawver), not because of the thrilling later sections, but because of how economically the first half of the film provides us with the perfect amount of information to understand everyone’s motivations when the second half arrives, when all hell breaks loose.

I must also mention the film’s, I guess, “mystical” content when it comes to African American history.  Early on, Annie, who is a “hoodoo” practitioner (I don’t think “witch” is the right word here), tells a lovely story about how, every once in a while, a musician comes along who can play so beautifully that their music “pierces the veil” between past, present, and future, inviting the spirits of all three to come together and enjoy the music as one.  There is a magnificent sequence where we get a visual representation of exactly that when Sammie starts to play the blues in the juke joint.  Trying to describe it in print is a fool’s errand, but it is one of the film’s many visual highlights.  Trust me.  You’ll know it when you see it.  It’s as elegant a representation of Black history as I’ve ever seen, and I don’t know how anyone will be able to top it in the future.

All of that, though, is just prologue for the main event: the vampires.  If you’ve read this long and didn’t know that was coming, I’m sorry I spoiled that for you, but you were warned.

The whole second half of Sinners flirts with becoming a straight-up genre picture, which is not a bad thing in itself, but which would have been almost disappointing when stacked against what came before.  However, because we have been given such a thorough grounding in all the characters beforehand, there are real stakes involved in trying to predict who will live and who will die.  Some deaths are almost foregone conclusions, but even those are more affecting than they would have been in other similar films.

Traditional vampire lore is very much at play, especially the bit about having to be invited into a house.  But the filmmakers did add one new bit, which I thought was EXTREMELY effective.  As a vampire is about to feed (or thinks it’s about to), it begins to drool…a thick, gooey saliva that drips from its mouth like ectoplasm.  This is a cool touch, and it makes perfect sense, a Pavlovian response to an imminent meal.  Don’t be surprised if another vampire film in the future steals that from Sinners.  I’d steal it.  Wouldn’t think twice about it.

Sinners undoubtedly has some deeper meanings that I am not qualified to unpack, and I leave it to you to find them.  This is one of the best films I’ve seen this year, and it is deservedly making bank at the box office.  (Over $200 million globally as of May 3rd, 2025.)  It is surprising, it is dramatic, it is thrilling, and it is worth seeing on the big screen.  Trust me.

VAMPYR (Germany, 1932)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Carl Th. Dreyer
CAST: Julian West, Maurice Schutz, Rena Mandel, Sybille Schmitz
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 98% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A drifter obsessed with the supernatural stumbles upon an inn where a severely ill adolescent girl is slowly becoming a vampire.


Carl Th. Dreyer’s Vampyr [pronounced “vom-PEER” in this German version] is not the scariest vampire film I’ve ever seen, but it is definitely one of the creepiest.  There’s a difference.  Dreyer’s film doesn’t move with the pacing seen in more standard horror fare.  Instead, it forsakes typical plot development for scenes that linger on the horrific or the unexplained.  In its own way, it is more directly related to the films of David Lynch than to any other contemporary monster movies of the time (Dracula or Frankenstein, for example, both 1931).

The story is fairly simple, but it belies the complex imagery that awaits the viewer.  A young drifter, Allan Grey, happens upon an inn from which he thinks he can hear animal sounds, or perhaps a young woman screaming.  The village doctor, who looks like a bespectacled long-lost relative of Doc Brown from Back to the Future, vehemently denies the presence any animals or young women on the property.  The innkeeper invites Allan to stay the night.  In the middle of the night, Allan’s sleep is interrupted by a mysterious visitor to his room who intones, “The girl must not die!”  The gentleman then leaves a package on Allan’s desk and writes a most portentous message: “TO BE OPENED ONLY UPON MY DEATH.”

What is this book?  What did Allan hear?  And how do you explain the shadows he saw on his way to the inn?  Shadows of people running along the lane – with no corresponding people attached to them?  Wouldn’t YOU like to know.

Vampyr is positively drowning in atmosphere.  Dreyer apparently shot many scenes with a piece of thin gauze over the lens, creating a misty layer that makes everything feel like a dream, even when Allan is awake.  Allan goes on frequent excursions around the inn and the surrounding property, and it’s here where most of the fantastical imagery is seen, especially when it comes to disembodied shadows.  In one mildly unsettling sequence, a shadow of a man with a peg leg descends a ladder and appears to sit on a bench…re-joining itself to a peg-legged man already sitting on the same bench.

There’s a lot more, but I don’t want to just write a list.  However, I am compelled to mention one sequence in particular that exudes as much creepiness as anything I’ve ever seen from this cinematic era.

It turns out there is, not one young woman at the inn, but two: Gisèle and Léone.  Léone is seen early on, confined to her bed with a mysterious illness, which we later learn has been brought on by her contact with a seldom-seen old woman who lurks somewhere on the property.  And there are some odd injuries on her neck…UH oh.

At one point, Léone awakes while Gisèle is alone with her.  I don’t remember what they discuss, but Léone goes into this weird sort of trance.  Without the use of any strange Chaney-esque makeup or camera tricks, Léone’s face becomes an object lesson in creepiness.  Her eyes open wide, her face breaks into a creepy grin, and she slowly moves her head from side to side, while Gisèle backs away in terror.  It might be the scariest sequence in the film, one which could easily compare to any subsequent monster or vampire movie.

Later, Dreyer throws more camera tricks at us in increasingly imaginative ways.  Allan dreams of a skeleton handing him a bottle of poison.  A dead man’s face appears in the sky during a sudden thunderstorm.  Dreyer includes camera moves that would fit right into any modern film.  And in a sequence that reminded me of Wes Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988), Allan watches as his own body is sealed inside a coffin with a tiny square window for his apparently dead eyes to look out of.

If nothing else, Vampyr is an interesting artifact of cinema’s transitional era from silent to sound.  Even though there is a conventional soundtrack and we hear people’s voices as they speak, a lot of expository information is provided via title cards and long looks at passages from a book of vampire lore.  Given that the vampire mythology was then not as popular as it is today, I can forgive these beats that tend to bring the momentum to a halt.

While Nosferatu (1922) and the Bela Lugosi Dracula are much more famous, Vampyr is worth a look if you’re a horror fan.  While it doesn’t involve the kind of fear factor I tend to expect as a child of the 1970s and ‘80s, it is nevertheless creepy as hell. 

MAXXXINE (2024)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Ti West
CAST: Mia Goth, Elizabeth Debicki, Michelle Monaghan, Bobby Cannavale, Giancarlo Esposito, Kevin Bacon
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 72% Certified Fresh

PLOT: In 1985 Hollywood, adult film star and aspiring actress Maxine Minx finally gets her big break. But as a mysterious killer stalks the starlets of Hollywood, a trail of blood threatens to reveal her sinister past.


When I started posting my blissful reviews of X and Pearl [both 2022], I got one response more than any other: “Wait till you get to MaXXXine; it’s the weakest of the trilogy.”  Having just watched it, I would say that calling MaXXXine the weakest film in this trilogy is like calling Return of the Jedi [1983] the weakest film in the original Star Wars trilogy.  You may be technically correct, but it’s still a great ride and a better film than many others in this genre.

Six years after the bloody events of X, we pick up the story of Maxine Minx (Mia Goth) as she auditions for a film role in Los Angeles.  She’s been signed by a devoted but semi-skeevy agent, Teddy (Giancarlo Esposito in a fabulously bad hairpiece), and she has experienced modest success as a porn star.  But she longs to spread her wings in “legitimate” films, because as we all remember, Maxine craves fame more than anything in the world.  As she never tires of repeating: “I will not accept a life I do not deserve.”

Just as things start looking up for Maxine’s career, a package is left on her doorstep…a VHS tape labeled ominously, “For Maxine.”  When she pops it into her VCR, she’s treated to a shot from her filmed but unfinished porn movie from six years ago…evidence which would link her to those horrific murders and endanger her newfound success.  Meanwhile, the infamous real-life serial killer Richard Ramirez, aka “The Night Stalker”, terrorizes Los Angeles at night, not to mention a copycat killer who is branding his victims with pentagrams.  How these murders are linked to Maxine, and when and where John Labat (Kevin Bacon) comes into play, is not for me to divulge.  And one by one, Maxine’s friends and co-workers are turning up dead…

The plot of MaXXXine is nothing new, let’s face it.  What makes it sparkle is the wit and TLC provided by director Ti West and his collaborators.  For anyone who was alive in 1985, this film is like a stroll down memory lane.  I found myself thinking about Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood [2019], with its loving recreation of late-1960s Los Angeles and serial-killer-related plotline.  That’s not to say MaXXXine is ripping off Q.T.’s film, not at all.  Both films have an immense affection for their respective timeframes and have gone to great lengths to immerse us in that culture.

Another filmmaker that came to mind during MaXXXine was Jordan Peele, director of his own trio of horror neo-classics: Get Out [2017], Us [2019], and Nope [2022].  Ti West’s films share a lot of characteristics with Peele’s films.  The Maxine trilogy looks like a million bucks on screen, despite what must have been very limited budgets.  The plots and screenplays are airtight with one or two minor exceptions.  (Peele’s plots are more Twilight Zone than reality, so they get a bit of a pass on plausibility.)  And the characters are intelligent, sharply drawn, and rarely fall into cliched behavior.

If MaXXXine is not quite as terrifying as its predecessors, I’m prepared to forgive it.  Whatever it lacks, it makes up for in its besottedness with Hollywood.  There is a scene where one character chases another through a Universal backlot (oddly deserted, but whatever); they run through various movie sets, including the town square featured in Gremlins [1984] and Back to the Future [1985], winding up at – and I almost could not believe this – the Bates Motel and even inside the Bates house behind it.  Only a director/screenwriter deeply in love with the movies, and horror films specifically, would dare to write a scene like that into their script, and I loved it.  (Trivia note: they had to get permission from the Hitchcock estate first…awesome.)

I haven’t even mentioned the movie’s subtext.  The movie Maxine has gotten a part for is being directed by a woman, Elizabeth Bender (the pleasingly towering Elizabeth Debicki), who believes The Puritan II is her chance to prove that her voice is worth listening to in an industry dominated by male voices, especially in 1985.  If the only way to get people to listen is to make a B-list horror movie with A-list concepts/ideas, so be it.  Two of the best horror movies I’ve seen in recent years were directed by women: The Babadook [2014] and Saint Maud [2019].  And yet, out of over 1,850 movies in my personal collection, only 70 were directed by women.  I guess things haven’t changed that much in the movie industry in forty years.  Discuss.

MaXXXine begins with a quote from Bette Davis.  I won’t recite the quote here, but it implies that an actor isn’t a star until they’re considered a monster.  I hope that’s not true.  But for Maxine Minx…if that’s what it takes, well, then…that’s what it takes.

THE SUBSTANCE

By Marc S. Sanders

It’s no surprise that a science fiction gore fest would make its way on the silver screen intent on enhancing our lives as we grow out of adult youth.  Plastic surgery and bust enhancements, unwanted hair removal, butt lifts and Botox are common vernacular discussed in magazine articles, infomercials and talk shows.  Well known actors rely on beauty preservations and enhancements to uphold their careers or give themselves a needed boost to stay relevant.  I mean come on, Tom Cruise wouldn’t naturally look like that.  Still?  Let’s get real.

What I admire about Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance is how she applies her updated Frankenstein experiments within the boundaries of Hollywood glitz and glamour.  Her film starts out ironic, then reflective and concludes on B level satire.  Wasn’t this how The Toxic Avenger came to be?

Fortunately, the brains of the writer/director overcome the beauty that’s attempted.

Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is an obvious nod to Oscar winner Jane Fonda.  She is unbelievably gorgeous and physically fit, especially for a fifty-year-old award-winning starlet. (Incidentally, Demi Moore is over age 60.) She has found a second career success as a daily TV workout video hostess. Yet, she senses that her expiration of youth is quickly approaching.  It could not be more apparent from what her sleazy producer Harvey shares with her.  This jerk has no filter and tells it like it is. Audiences want younger and curvier, and Elisabeth ain’t it.  Harvey is played by Dennis Quaid and Farageat is not shy about presenting this guy with every priority of superficiality.

Elisabeth gets axed from her show.  Fortunately, she comes upon a possible remedy for her aging dilemma known as The Substance.  After some toiling about, Elisabeth agrees to try this clandestine idea out promising a better, more improved version of herself.  

The kit to make this all happens is delivered.  First is a needle injection and further instructions mandate without compromise that every seven days Elisabeth must return from the alter ego that spawns from her.  Except this is not so much an alter ego as it is alter body.  Literally from behind Elisabeth’s back enters Sue (Margaret Qualley).  Both Elisabeth and Sue are reminded by the mysterious voice on the phone that they are “one,” and they must use the contents of their kits to nourish one another’s bodies daily plus, and without fail, surrender to a seven-day hibernation while the other roams the earth.  Every seven days they must alternate.

Sue, with Elisabeth’s psyche, gets the job as the replacement hostess and Harvey goes nuts for her as the ratings and her popularity soars.  The Substance is serving its purpose.  

Yet, what happens when the two egos do not cooperate with the program’s mandates?  Well, you find out with an assortment of grotesque and ugly side effects that develop both mentally, and especially physically.  The Substance tackles some extraordinary consequences ranging from multiple personality disorders that joust with one another, and insecurities that even beauty enhancements could never resolve.

Amid all of the ugly gore of blood and fluids and stitching and rotted, infected skins is a jaw dropping performance from Demi Moore.  The Substance is deliberately not big on dialogue as it depends more on perception and facial response.  The best example is when Moore as Elisabeth prepares herself for a date and builds up an unnerving frustration as her character focuses on her reflection in the mirror.  I read that Demi Moore slapped and rubbed the skin of her face raw while shooting this scene in take after take.  Her commitment to the scene could not be more evident.  A later scene with her adorned in offensively aged makeup is at least as aggressive for the actress.  A food binge goes maniacal, and Demi Moore is sensationally focused on its messiness and engorgement.

The Substance is very smart from beginning to end.  Yet, the conclusion is outright ridiculous, and Coralie Fargeat clearly wants it that way.  It’s not only that Elisabeth and Sue suffer at the punishments of their own hubris, but Harvey and those that put appearances over any kind of, well, substance must succumb to their own superficial priorities.  Fargeat takes what could have been a comparable messy Three Stooges pie in the face route where everyone’s dignity has to be shed.  The blinders of beauty get washed away in an overwhelming deluge.

The Substance is elevated to an absurd narrative as quick as it begins.  No one is glamorized even if this is Hollywood.  We get close ups of Harvey gorging himself on sloppy, saucy cocktail shrimp while Elisabeth watches in disgust.  Later, the physical side effects go by way of famous makeup artist’s Rob Bottin’s work on films like John Carpenter’s The Thing.  The director tosses obvious nods to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining with a ghastly orange hallway and reminiscent geometrically zig zag carpeting.  Even a men’s room designed in cherry blood red harkens back to that film.  Food is repulsive in this film that focuses on body image.  Colors of all kinds are loud, garish, and bright.  The director doesn’t want you to wince at only the very graphic details of Elisabeth and Sue’s ongoing transformations.  If these characters are going to feel or behave ugly, then the world they live will feel at least as repulsive.

A friend of mine who takes to curious kinds of horror and fright fests was eager to see The Substance.  She watched the night before I did and was angered by the ending that she found ridiculously over the top.  Definitely no argument there.  Yet, because this is satire offering a reflection of truth, as gross as the film is and as absurd as the ending gets, it logically adds up.  

We can try all we want to hold on to our youth and outer appearances.  However, either we must learn to become satisfied with the limitations that science can offer or we will pay penalties for defying what is instructed of ourselves.  The Substance is beyond any sense of science.  This film tosses hints at the viewer that Elisabeth, and later Sue, should think twice about what they choose next.  Then again, whoever thinks twice in one these B movie schlock fests, anyway?  

I even think this film goes a step further.  In cancer patients, chemotherapy remains the leading remedy for treatment of the illness.  We turn to its resolve despite the sickening side effects that stem from its program.  We want to live and we will compromise our ways to go on living.  Elisabeth Sparkle needs to remember though that she does not suffer from cancer.  She’s an insecure woman who isn’t ready to face change.  I’m not minimizing how the character feels.  I can relate.  She is facing a hard, agonizing truth from her perspective. I took steps in my lifetime to enhance my appearance and mentally and physically it was not the best option for me.  

It’s fortunate that Demi Moore allows me to relate to what’s traumatizing her.  Margaret Qualley does well holding up the other half of the picture as her side of this one personality gets drunk off the attention and perfection she’s entered into this new world.  

Commonly speaking, I also thought of the Queen from Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs.  An elegant woman so insecure with her beauty against that of a young girl and she sees no other way to come out on top than to change into an ugly, old hag.  Like Elisabeth in The Substance, the Queen in Snow White will accept a notion of looking worse before it gets better.  Since this film is satire, don’t we all go through experiences like this at one time or another?

Some of us learn.  Some of us persist and persist though.

NOSFERATU (2024)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Robert Eggers
CAST: Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Bill Skarsgård, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Willem Dafoe
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 85% Certified Fresh

PLOT: The true OG vampire movie gets a fresh coat of paint in this gothic tale of obsession between a haunted young woman and the terrifying vampire infatuated with her.


Allow me to begin, as so many great films do, with a couple of flashbacks.

2018: The indie band Weezer records and releases their polarizing cover of Toto’s stone-cold classic “Africa.”  While recorded and produced with all the modern techniques at their disposal, fans of both bands say, correctly, that this new version is virtually identical to the original…so what was the point?  Couldn’t they have put some kind of new spin on it, like (for better or worse) UB40 and their cover of “Can’t Help Falling in Love”?  Why bother?

1991: Orion Pictures releases The Silence of the Lambs, an adaptation of Thomas Harris’s terrifying psychological thriller.  It goes on to win the coveted “Big Five” at the Oscars: Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay (Adapted).  Having devoured the book during one summer vacation, I go to a screening expecting to be wowed.  But…because the filmmakers stuck SO closely to the book (with some minor exceptions), there is little to no suspense for me.  While I am genuinely floored by how well-made and well-acted the film is, I do not experience any of the thrills and chills felt by those viewers who had NOT read the book.  I knew ahead of time what they would find in the corpse’s throat in the funeral parlor, how Lecter would escape from the courthouse, and how Starling would stumble upon Buffalo Bill’s house.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a stellar movie.  But it was never truly scary for me.

Which brings me to Robert Eggers’s long-gestating remake of THE original vampire movie, Nosferatu.  Based on the immortal silent classic of the same name from 1922, directed by F.W. Murnau, the story will be familiar to any serious film/horror buffs, especially since Murnau “borrowed” liberally from Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula, without first obtaining legal permission from Stoker’s estate.  How liberally?  Here’s a quote from IMDb: “All known prints and negatives were destroyed under the terms of settlement of a lawsuit by Bram Stoker’s widow.”  The only way the film survived was via 2nd-generation copies from other countries around the world.  Plagiarism?  Or homage?  I would normally say here, “You be the judge,” but the courts seem to have answered that question pretty definitively.

I mention this because every version of the Dracula mythology, starting with Nosferatu all the way through the semi-campy Hammer films to Coppola’s famous “low-tech” version and beyond – all of them tell the same story with only minor changes.  Consequently, the thing I look for in those films is not WHAT they’re telling me, but HOW they’re telling it.  Any student of pop culture knows Bruce Wayne’s origin story, so Batman Begins [2005] holds no surprises there, but the story is told extremely well, and so you roll with it, you know what I mean?

With Eggers’s Nosferatu, the production values on display are magnificent.  Eggers gets the mood and tone of a genuinely gothic horror story exactly right, as I knew he would, based on his previous films, especially The VVitch [2015].  The colors are muted to recreate the vibe of a black-and-white film, which paradoxically makes some of the scarier scenes even scarier.  The performances all around are top notch.  Poor Nicholas Hoult is saddled with the thankless Thomas Hutter role, stuck in straight-man mode the entire film; but Lily-Rose Depp had me thunderstruck with her performance as Ellen, Thomas’s wife, and the dependable Bill Skarsgård delivers the goods as Count Orlok, with a proper Transylvanian moustache (right out of the history books, haters) and an accent thick enough to tar ten miles of a country road with.

But let’s think about this for a second.  Those of you unfamiliar with the story of Nosferatu might be thinking to yourselves, “Who’s Thomas Hutter?  Who’s Ellen?  Don’t you mean Jonathan Harker and Mina?”  Well, naturally, those are the names the vast majority of filmgoers are going to be familiar with, not Thomas and Ellen and Count Orlok (which for my money is a much creepier name than “Dracula,” but I digress).

And therein lies part of the problem with this film.  I was so thoroughly familiar with the Dracula story that, even though this new film is a wonder to behold, it held very little suspense for me, since I knew exactly what was going to happen next, beat for beat.  There are, of course, cosmetic differences here and there: Thomas’s visit to a Romani village before he arrives at Orlok’s castle…Orlok’s straight-up possessions of Ellen…the highly effective jump-scares with the dogs here and there.  But I’ve seen it all before, MANY times.

(By contrast, I just recently watched one of the greatest slasher movies I’ve ever seen, X [2022], and it has virtually every slasher-movie-trope imaginable, and yet it somehow managed to transcend its own genre and become some kind of crazy masterpiece.)

In fact, in a very unexpected twist, there actually were two genuinely scary/creepy moments for me, and neither of them featured Count Orlok himself, at least not in the flesh.  They both involved Ellen, Thomas’s new wife, who becomes literally possessed by Orlok’s influence in scenes that legitimately give The Exorcist [1973] a run for its money.  Ellen thrashes about, rolls her eyes into the back of her head, speaks in an unnaturally guttural croak, bends backwards impossibly far – is Lily-Rose Depp a contortionist on the side? – and generally scares the bejeezus out of her husband and the audience.  On the strength of these two scenes alone, in addition to the general excellence of filmmaking craft on display, I would have no hesitation in recommending Nosferatu to moviegoers.

So, yes, despite my disappointments at the story level, given there were virtually no surprises plot-wise, I still give the movie a favorable rating just because it’s so well made.  If it had been created in a vacuum, if there had never been a vampire movie before this one, I believe I would have been creeped out to a much greater degree than I was, and this would have been hailed as an instant masterpiece.  But it is darkly beautiful to look at and wonderfully moody; there are many shots that are very nearly duplicates of shots from the original, which I enjoyed on a film-geek level.  I look forward to Robert Eggers tackling purely original material again.  He knows what he’s doing.

PEARL (2022)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Ti West
CAST: Mia Goth, David Corenswet, Tandi Wright, Emma Jenkins-Purro
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 93% Certified Fresh

PLOT: In 1918, a young Texas woman on the brink of madness pursues stardom in a desperate attempt to escape the drudgery, isolation, and lovelessness of life on her parents’ farm.


I originally gave Pearl a rating of 9 out of 10 because it was not quite as terrifying as its predecessor, X [2022], but I have decided to amend that to a 10 out of 10 based solely on the performance by Mia Goth in the title role.  If her performance had appeared in anything other than an indie horror film, I firmly believe she would have been nominated for an Oscar, or at least a Golden Globe.  But I’ll get to that in a second.

Pearl is a prequel to the acclaimed horror flick X, in which most of a porno film crew is stalked and murdered by an insane old woman, Pearl, and her equally insane old husband, Howard, in Texas in 1979.  It starred Mia Goth as Maxine, a stripper who was convinced she was meant for bigger and better things.  This time, in the prequel, Goth plays Pearl as a young woman growing up in Texas, but this time it’s 1918.  World War I is on the verge of ending, but the Spanish Flu pandemic is in full swing; folks in town don’t go anywhere or do anything in town without wearing a cloth mask over their nose and mouth.  (Sound familiar?)

Pearl’s home life is not quite functional.  In her first scene, over a lush score that sounds as if it were imported from the 1940s, Pearl dances in the barn and talks to a cow and a goat and a horse, like Snow White, about how she’s going to become famous and leave town, and everyone will know her name.  Then a goose waddles in from outside and interrupts her conversation; Pearl gets an odd look in her eye, grabs a pitchfork, sidles up to the goose, aaaand you can probably guess the rest.  (The gator from X makes a nice cameo shortly thereafter.)  Meanwhile, that ‘40s musical score punctuates the action like a Disney movie.  The effect is profoundly odd, but compelling.

We learn more about Pearl’s home life with her invalid father and domineering mother, Ruth (Tandi Wright).  She married young, but her husband, Howard, was called off to war in Europe, leaving her alone with her less-than-ideal parents.  She dreams of fame, but Ruth, with her strong German accent, sternly reminds Pearl of her responsibilities to her father and the farm.  One day, Pearl rides her bicycle to town to buy medicine for her father (sounds like the beginning of a fairy tale) and decides to go to the movies, which were very different in 1918.  She meets the strikingly handsome projectionist (David Corenswet, aka the new Superman) who encourages her to take the time to live her own life before it’s too late.  On her way home, Pearl stops in a cornfield, finds a scarecrow, and engages in a charming little song and dance with him…until her mind plays tricks on her and the encounter turns into something altogether different.

The whole movie is like that.  Shot in vivid colors and featuring an evocative soundtrack, it alternates between The Wizard of Oz and Joker.  (In fact, IMDb trivia notes that female fans of this movie call it “the female Joker.”)  It keeps you off balance in all the best ways, threatening to fly apart, but Ti West’s direction and Mia Goth’s performance manage to hold everything together in a satisfying, but disturbing, whole.  As with X, I can acknowledge the achievement, but I’m damned if I can explain how it was done.

There are many highlights in Pearl: her audition for a traveling dance show.  Pearl wheeling her father to the edge of the lakeside dock.  The scarecrow.  The tipping point between Pearl and her mother.  The pig on the porch.  (Gross.)  The look on her father’s face when Pearl dresses him up for a gentleman caller.  But the pièce de résistance of the entire film is, without question, Pearl’s monologue.

In a movie in which Mia Goth teeters on overkill in several scenes, the screenplay (co-written by Goth and Ti West) provides Pearl with a heart-rending soliloquy that should be more famous than it is.  Pearl’s sister-in-law, Mitsi (Emma Jenkins-Purro), sensing that Pearl is troubled, encourages her to indulge in a little play-acting: “Pretend I’m Howard.  What do you want to say to me?”  What follows is a 7-minute speech, most of it captured in an unbroken 5-minute take that must be seen to be believed.  In it, Goth expresses virtually every emotion imaginable as she unburdens herself, purges herself of all her repressed rage at her husband for leaving her alone, at her mother for holding her back from her dreams, at her father for having the temerity to fall ill and causing her to remain home for his sake.

Does this speech excuse her violent behavior?  Not at all.  But it explains it as well as any other serial killer movie I’ve ever seen.  I was reminded a little bit of Charlize Theron in Monster [2003], who also played a woman who committed terrible crimes, yes, but who was pushed into making those choices by her family and a society who little noticed or cared about her situation.  That’s how stirring Goth’s performance is, that I would compare it to one of the greatest performances ever captured on film.  In a movie that flirts with parody a couple of times, this last speech grounds it and the main character firmly in the real world.  It’s truly astonishing.

I’m almost sorry I saw Pearl AFTER watching X.  Almost.  It kind of makes me want to go back and watch X again, armed with all this new information on Pearl’s backstory.  It also solidifies the psychic connection between Pearl and Maxine, which was touched on several times in X, and which I imagine will be revisited in some way in Maxxxine [2024]…but I’m just speculating.  Pearl is good enough to stand with any of the best serial-killer-origin stories ever made.

(P.S.  As with X, you’ll want to make sure you watch the credits, except this time you want to stay with it until the last image fades to black…you’ll know what I mean.  IMDb informs me this crazy, creepy moment happened because after the last line, director Ti West refused to yell “Cut” and just let the camera run, and the actor in question, being a professional, simply stayed in character.  It’s remarkably unsettling.)

X (2022)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Ti West
CAST: Mia Goth, Jenna Ortega, Brittany Snow, Kid Cudi
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 94% Certified Fresh

PLOT: In 1979, a group of young filmmakers set out to make an adult film on a rural Texas farm, but when their elderly hosts catch them in the act, the crew find themselves fighting for their lives.


I like great horror, but I have never enjoyed slasher films, with the clear exceptions of Halloween [1978] and Psycho [1960].  They tend to fall too easily into the formulas lampooned in Scream [1996] and The Cabin in the Woods [2011] and lose all suspense when the stories cave in to ancient tropes and traditions.  You’ve seen one bloodthirsty masked strangler/slasher/axe-murderer jump from behind a tree at night, you’ve seen them all.

So, how do I explain my delight and gushing praise for X, the indie horror phenomenon that turned Mia Goth and director Ti West into industry darlings?  I can only report that, despite following timeworn traditions of the genre, this film somehow found a way to ratchet up the tension to almost unbearable levels.  I’m not exaggerating.  The night I finished watching it, I found it impossible to fall asleep right away.  My mind was racing and rehashing what I had just seen.  It is the creepiest, scariest horror film I’ve seen since Hereditary [2018], and I freaking LOVE Hereditary.

The plot is right out of Slasher Films 101.  The year is 1979.  An aspiring group of wannabe porn stars pile into a van and head to a rural Texas farm where the crusty owner has agreed to rent out his barn and guesthouse, ignorant of this motley crew’s true motives.  The composition of the group reads like the beginning of a dirty joke: a cowboy, a film school graduate, his mousy girlfriend, two strippers, and a black guy (Kid Cudi…yes, that Kid Cudi).

Upon their arrival on the farm, ominous music and occasional breathy noises on the soundtrack tip us off that something just ain’t right…not to mention the blood-soaked prologue.  The elderly farmer, Howard, has an elderly wife, Pearl, but we don’t see much of her at first.  There’s a magnificently tense scene when one of the strippers, Maxine (Mia Goth), skinny dips in the lake behind the farm, unaware of the gator eyeing her from the opposite bank.  It slithers into the lake just as Maxine starts to swim back to the dock.  An overhead shot shows Maxine swimming leisurely, and the gator getting closer and closer, and…I mean, I’ve seen scores, if not hundreds of movies with similar scenes, and very few of them evoked the kind of terror I felt as that gator closed in on Maxine.

Why?  This isn’t even a monster movie about a killer gator, it’s a – let’s be honest – formulaic movie with creepy old people and a slew of young people just waiting to be dispatched in hopefully creative ways.  But something about how Ti West directed this film got right under my skin, in a good way.  Even in the gloriously retro scenes when the ersatz film crew is shooting a sex scene, there is still an undercurrent of unease over the whole enterprise.  (And by the way, if I were to make a list of things I didn’t think I’d ever see in a movie, a topless Brittany Snow in a brief-but-raunchy sex scene would be really close to the top.)

It’s hard for me to describe the intensely creepy atmosphere in writing, especially because I want to preserve the film’s surprises for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet…and boy, I wish I could be there to watch it with you.  There’s the scene in the farmhouse between Maxine and the farmer’s elderly wife, Pearl, where you have absolutely every reason to believe it’s about to turn all Texas-Chainsaw, and then the scene abruptly pivots.  Pearl looks like your stereotypical crazy old lady; that’s the best way I can put it.  I seem to remember a few characters who looked like her in the background of Shutter Island [2010].  We learn a little bit about Pearl’s past, and we can see that she’s sharper than she looks…or maybe she’s just crazy.  I’m not sayin’.

When things heat up around the halfway mark, the tension factor skyrockets.  I learned a phrase a while ago that captures it perfectly: the film becomes a stress sandwich.  Situations arise that we’ve all seen before, but in this movie I was on the edge of my seat waiting to see what would happen next.  When Jackson (Cudi) searches the lake at night and makes a creepy discovery right out of Hitchcock.  When “Don’t Fear the Reaper” plays at a critical moment.  When Lorraine (Jenna Ortega…yes, that Jenna Ortega) goes to the cellar looking for a flashlight.  When a soundly sleeping Maxine gets some unwanted physical contact from a nocturnal visitor.  (That sound you just heard is me shuddering.)

I could write more about the plot, but I would give something away, I’m sure.  To call the film’s finale satisfying is a vast understatement, right down to the very last line that, in my book, is as perfect as “Nobody’s perfect!” or “Tomorrow is another day!”  Ti West has created a slasher movie for people who hate slasher movies, and it’s one of the best modern examples of the genre that has ever been made.

(P.S.  Don’t spoil this for yourself by Googling it or anything if you don’t already know, but make sure you watch the closing credits.  When I saw the name of the performer who plays “Pearl”, my jaw dropped.)