Scared Sloth Film Reviews

Directed by Rupert Sanders

Full disclosure, I have not seen the 90s cult classic The Crow, starring the late Brandon Lee. I’m familiar with it by reputation of course, a gothic action thriller with a tragic tale of an on-set accident that cut Lee’s life short, it’s reason enough to not want to touch the franchise again, even if there were already sequels without Lee. Good taste never stopped Hollywood, so our good friends at Lionsgate decided the world needed a new The Crow, this time with Bill Skarsgard. Skarsgard is fresh off the quite fun Boy Kills World, so I was hoping that this might be a similarly enjoyable cheesy action movie. Boy, was I wrong.

In A Violent Nature

Directed by Chris Nash

It’s not often that movies make it to the theater without an official Motion Picture Association of America age rating, a rating system so common that people may mistake it for a government-backed censor board. Even though it kind of functions like that, there isn’t any enforcement branch to the MPAA, so when film producers refuse to abide by these standards and remove violence or sex, or the gays depending on the year, they can release movies without that rating. Usually, this is because the movie has too much graphic sexual content and it got the old dudes on the board too hot and bothered to think straight, but in some cases, like with In A Violent Nature, extreme violence is the culprit, which is so odd considering that violent movies make the film industry billions upon billions of dollars, but god-forbid there’s a bit too much violence. This was all a long-winded way of me introducing In A Violent Nature, an unrated Canadian slasher film distributed by IFC and the good people at Shudder.

It’s been a minute since I’ve written anything. Please pardon my absence, I was dealing with family issues that zapped my creativity and prevented me from putting my thoughts to the page. Happily, I received an unexpected burst of inspiration from a recent entry in the ‘make every fairy tale a gritty slasher’ horror subgenre with Mary Had A Little Lamb, a movie that I obviously wasn’t expecting to be good. But this movie isn’t just bad, it’s bafflingly bad, a type of bad that makes me question why they made it and what they hoped to achieve. I know you probably have never seen this and will never see this, so please, let me work through my thoughts on Mary Had A Little Lamb for my own sake.

Directed by Jeff Wadlow

I hadn’t heard of this movie before I saw a poster that was simply a teddy bear with the title ‘Imaginary’ and didn’t know what it was so I checked for a trailer, then all the usual suspects appeared. A family moves into a new house, there is tension between parents and children, something innocuous turns out to be evil, but enough about Night Swim, we’re talking about Imaginary! Imaginary, Blumhouse’s new foray into bear themed horror, which shouldn’t surprise anyone after the disgusting financial success of Five Nights at Freddy’s, came out in early March to prove that it isn’t just January that gets pointless horror releases.

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.