Category: Movie Reviews

Night Swim (2024)

Directed & Written by Bryce McGuire

Last year, right about this time, Blumhouse released a movie about a little killer animatronic friend called Megan. Surprisingly, I liked Megan quite a bit for a January release of a movie featuring a killer doll doing TikTok dances, a fact that encouraged me to see the new Blumhouse/Atomic Robot collaboration, Night Swim. The trailer didn’t tell me too much about Night Swim, just that someone swims at night, and if you couldn’t figure that out from the title, then you may need more help than I can give, but I was trying to keep an open mind and hope that just maybe a magical repeat would happen and Blumhouse would be back on top after that mind-blowingly bad conclusion to the new Halloween trilogy. I summoned all of my hopes and decided to dive into Night Swim. (You know I had to get at least one water pun in there.)

Godzilla Minus One (2023)

Directed by Takashi Yamazaki

70 years ago, the face of cinema changed in an instant when the king of the monsters, Godzilla, burst onto the scene in a classic horror movie about, among other things, the horrors of nuclear warfare. Things changed a lot for Godzilla after that and he became everything from a villain, a force of nature, a protector of children, and even the guardian of Earth when extraterrestrial beasts reared their ugly heads again and again, but Godzilla was and still is the best kaiju. Sure, there are a million spinoffs, knockoffs, and ‘inspired by’ monsters, but none of them have stood the test of time like Godzilla, a monster I am 100% sure you can clearly picture in your head right now without me even having to describe him. With more than 30 films in the series there were bound to be some bad ones, and boy were they bad, but none of that matters because Godzilla Minus One is here to remind everyone how it’s done and make it look easy.

It’s A Wonderful Knife

Directed by Tyler MacIntyre

I’ve made no secret over the years how much of a soft spot I have for slasher movies. I also have a huge soft spot for movies that are aggressively weird and out there, so how could I not go see a slasher movie that’s functionally a remake of the Christmas classic It’s A Wonderful Life? Somehow, somewhere, someone thought that it would be a good idea to reimagine this Christmas movie as a violent slasher film, and I have to admit that it is a great idea. We’ve all seen It’s A Wonderful Life, or have heard enough about it through cultural osmosis that we basically know what it is, and playing with that by making it about a particularly non-jolly topic could lead to some good jokes. This isn’t totally unexpected because the writer of this film also wrote Freaky, the slasher movie remake of Freaky Friday, but let’s tackle this one at a time and see if this truly is a wonderful knife.

Directed by Matthew Goodhue

*SPOILERS FOR SLOTHERHOUSE*

I asked for a horror movie starring a sloth, and, for my sins, I got one. Many years ago, in a review of Cannibal Holocaust, I remarked how the sloth seen in that movie may have been the only sloth to appear in a horror movie. Here we are, years later, and I finally have a slasher movie starring a sloth, one that I was so pumped to see that it made me legitimately sad when I couldn’t attend the one-night theater release in person. After all that Slotherhouse finally came to Hulu and after having seen it I can say with no hesitation or remorse that it is not good. At all. It hurt me more than any movie I’ve seen in a long – long – time. So let’s dissect this thing and find out what went wrong.

Saw X (2023)

Directed by Kevin Greutert

Congratulations to Lionsgate on their momentous accomplishment of reaching the 10th film in the Saw series! Who would have thought that a low-budget movie about Cary Elwes cutting off his own leg could spawn a franchise to call its own? Amusingly, the Saw franchise kind of passed me by, I saw the last one, Spiral, but haven’t seen a main franchise Saw movie in over a decade, so I didn’t know what to expect. So I asked a friend of mine who I consider an expert on the Saw franchise if he noticed any kind of evolution between Saw and Saw X, and the answer was a resounding, “No.” If that doesn’t give you high hopes for the newest installment, I don’t know what will!

Talk to Me

Directed by Danny and Michael Philippou

Oof, it’s been a minute hasn’t it? I have tons of excuses but let’s just cut that and get to why I’m here, I saw a movie and wanted to write about it. If you’re familiar with my tastes, then you already know I’m a big fan of the horror movies from A24, I loved Hereditary, Saint Maude, and The Lighthouse in particular, so whenever they release something I pay attention. Talk to Me already had a level of expectation going in, I’d heard that a lot of beloved genre filmmakers praised it, and that it had been doing well financially, but A24 stuff doesn’t always click with me, so I wanted to see it before I recommended it to anyone. Oh man, am I glad I saw this. Talk to Me is a breath of fresh air, a new take on an outdated horror subgenre that shows just what you can do with a simple premise and quality filmmaking.

M3GAN
Directed by Gerard Johnstone

At the end of last year, I saw a series of trailers for M3GAN, a movie about a lifelike doll going on a killing spree. As someone who’s seen most of the Child’s Play franchise (about everyone’s favorite killer doll Chucky), this was all familiar territory, only genderswapped. Considering that this was also a January release, a time of year notorious for the release of projects that studios just want to get rid of, I was not feeling particularly hopeful about the quality of M3GAN. I went into M3GAN thankful that at least it wasn’t going to be three hours long like every other movie getting released now, but left shocked, as M3GAN is kind of good.