Three Films Make A Post: Every night a different nightmare.

Until Dawn (2025): There’s very little substance to David F. Sandberg’s horror videogame adaptation (which apparently isn’t any kind of close adaptation, people who actually played it tell me), but as an amusement park horror piece that sets off from a somewhat clever high concept to provide a series of ever-changing set pieces of suspense and gore, this is actually great stuff.

I’m not always the biggest fan of “fun horror” (it’s me, not the fun), but for me, this supernatural slasher variant simply hits all the right notes, is well paced and staged, and features a bunch of characters that isn’t too annoying to spend a hundred minutes with. Plus, once you’ve hit the spot where a series of messily exploding characters is just one of a dozen of good little gore gags you provide, you’re doing alright in my book.

Fear Street: Prom Queen (2025): This Netflix thing directed by Matt Palmer, on the other hand, is as bad as slickly produced horror gets. It must have been difficult to follow up on Leigh Janiuk’s brilliant Fear Street trilogy with its mix of all horror genres, ever, and its treatment of race and class, and the feeling of doom teens of the underclasses carry around with them, but surely, the way to go there shouldn’t have been to not even try to reach the level of the previous movies.

As it stands, this is the epitome of laziness: boring 80s nostalgia, and over-reliance on plot twists, acting that suggests a complete absence of directorial guidance, perfunctory gore, and writing so disinserted and flat, the whole thing doesn’t actually feel as if anybody involved cared even so much to create a good product, let’s not even speak of a decent movie.

Demon City aka Oni Goroshi (2025): Speaking of films that don’t even feel like good product, this (again) Netflix outing by director Seiji Tanaka somehow manages to make a movie about a super assassin waking up from a coma to murder the corrupt real estate development cultists that killed his family (on the day of his retirement, of course) I can’t get behind.

Well, I say “somehow”, but really, simply by an inability to stage and choreograph a decent action scene, an unwillingness to really make its weird villains feel weird (or silly) instead of just faintly stupid, and a tendency to drown the soundtrack in the shittiest “rock” guitar thrashing I’ve had the displeasure to hear in a long time.

In short: Shazam! (2019)

I am all for, and actually very happy with, DC trying to save its superhero bacon by lightening up a little and actually putting out films with different tones and approaches beyond Grimdark Batman is Rorschach epics. David F. Sandberg’s Shazam! however, really isn’t how you do that, unless one can’t see a difference between light and completely empty.

It’s not that I would have preferred a grimdark reading of Fawcett’s Captain Marvel, but I’d rather have preferred one whose jokes aren’t quite as dumb and unimaginative as those in the film at hand, or one that actually knows how to shift between the silly stuff and the (theoretically) deeper bits effectively because it understands that both are sides of the same coin (say Guardians of the Galaxy style). Come to think of it, I would perhaps have been okay with the film if its jokes just were funny instead of inane and flat.

The more serious stuff is treated in the most perfunctory manner, clearly working from the impression that the kids I assume are supposed to be the film’s main audience are just too dense to understand even the tiniest bit of subtlety or complexity – as if something like Bumblebee that aims for the same core audience but doesn’t pretend kids are brain-dead didn’t exist. And man, are there wasted opportunities in the film concerning the nature of families of birth as well as of families of choice, or how a certain wizard who likes to kidnap kids and then tell them they are not “pure” enough is a bit of a creep and an asshole and actually responsible for everything bad happening in the movie (something that’s just barely acknowledged by the film).

Other disappointments belong to the more nerdy space like the incredibly unimaginative way the film wastes mad scientist Dr. Sivana (given by Mark Strong strictly phoning it in) and lets him become a guy who just punches people with super strength, instead of, say, having him preside over the anti-family to Captain Marvel’s family of choice like even the golden age comics knew to do. This, to me, seems symptomatic to the film’s greatest sin: a complete lack of imagination in how to use the material it has been given, superhero movie tropes as a whole, or just the possibility space modern superhero films open between the flying and the punching. In its whole feel of the filmmakers not actually knowing how this stuff works, Shazam! reminds me of pre Raimi Spider-Man superhero movies in its awkwardness.

Sandberg’s direction really doesn’t help the film’s case at all, presenting some surprisingly wonkily shot superhero action that culminates in a climax so badly edited, staged and conceived it boggles the mind how you can even manage to fail this badly at an action scene with all the technical expertise and money this sort of production has available to it.


But hey, at least it’s better than Venom.

Three Films Make A Post: Nothing can stop the Killer with a Blood Lust for Ladies - Naked and Dead.

Chang Chen Ghost Stories aka Be Possessed By Ghosts (2015): Xu Zheng-Chao’s mainland Chinese horror is quite the mess. Wildly pivoting from the rotest possible ghost shtick through psychological horror through thriller motives and back again without a care for coherence and believability, the film not only never finds its tone, it also features a plot that makes no sense at all in the possible worst way. The character’s are as bland and one-dimensional as is all too common in mainland China genre films, keeping the interest in anything that may or may not happen to them low, while Xu’s direction overstrains anything he tries to do, be it the simplest shock or the (patently absurd) psychological elements of the film.

Midnight Man (1995): This Lorenzo Lamas vehicle directed by John Weidner is a pretty decent piece of US martial arts action. It’s either not quite silly enough or too silly to make it high onto my list of beloved entries into the genre canon, but it flows pretty well, and the action is at least decent, while the plot is a choice series of clichés done entertaining enough.
Plus, how can you dislike a film that pretends Lamas is Cambodian (as are a slew of Chinese-American and Japanese-American actors), and features an evil member of an ancient warrior cult walk around in a hilarious kit with razor-sharp hems that look suspiciously like aluminium?

Lights Out (2016): And then there’s this curious film: a James Wan produced contemporary mainstream horror film that actually features a supernatural threat that has thematic coherence and abilities and works as a metaphor for mental illness (which you can, depending on your tastes, read as pretty offensive or as pretty insightful), uses not only jump scares, lacks an idiotic plot twist right at the end, and features expectedly great (Maria Bello) to good (Teresa Palmer and non-annoying kid actor Gabriel Bateman) acting.


It’s pleasantly small scale, quite atmospheric, and has a pleasant air of simplicity, Eric Heisserer’s screenplay and David F. Sandberg’s direction concentrating on a handful of characters and a single supernatural threat (that also isn’t a demon). A fun time is had by all, unless one is hit by the less kind interpretation of the film’s ideas about mental illness, which will leave one rather cranky.