Three Films Make A Post: Can you keep a secret?

The Housemaid (2025): On paper, I absolutely appreciate Paul Feig’s attempt to update the old erotic thriller formula for the 90s, but in practice, I found the resulting movie mostly dull. It is much, much too long for what it is – there’s at least half an hour of redundant repetition in here – and its self-conscious trashiness neither reaches the joys provided by simple, actual trashiness nor does it do much that’s really surprising in any way in its twists on the formula.

I also wish Feig had found a shared tone for his actors: Amanda Seyfried is all turned up to campy eleven, Sydney Sweeney aims for slightly zoned out naturalism, and Brandon Sklenar stays on “sleepy” even when he’s supposed to become anything but.

Blood Beast of Monster Mountain (1975): This is its very own, one-of-a-kind type of nonsense: one Donn Davison (“world traveller, lecturer and psychic investigator”) tries to bend a ten years old unfunny bigfoot comedy into a Legend of Boggy Creek shaped form. He can’t, so the audience is threatened by everything that’s horrible about bad low budget comedy – the film’s “funny” protagonist is called “Bestoink Dooley” as a marker of the ensuing horrors – with the added frisson of watching multi-un-talented Davison “interview witnesses”.

If you’re suffering from the same kind of movie sickness as I do, this probably does sound at least somewhat fun, but in actuality, you’re better off gazing into the abyss than at this one.

We Bury the Dead (2024): On the other hand, I was very positively surprised by Zak Hilditch’s treatment of a localized zombie apocalypse as an excuse to explore grief and guilt. Daisy Ridley is actually a fine actress for this sort of thing, and while this is not going to make anyone happy who is looking for a gory zombie apocalypse film, this is a very pleasant example of a a movie about a personal apocalypse.

Three Films Make A Post: It'll cost you an arm and a leg...

Ghostbusters (2016): Unlike some guys who really seem disturbed by the mere concept of a film with female protagonists, I really wanted to like this one. Unfortunately, I think it’s about as funny as a funeral (so typical for Paul Feig movies and me), with oh so many non-starter jokes without punch lines, scenes that go on endlessly for no particular reason, pacing problems, a total lack of the urgency the plot of the original Ghostbusters had while actually being funny, badly defined characters, boring ghosts, and an all-around lackluster air I find completely befuddling given how beloved the first original Ghostbusters movie was.

There’s really no good reason why this one isn’t better – the money’s there, the people involved seem actually enthusiastic about the project, yet still it’s on the same level of blandness as Legend of Tarzan.

Satanic (2016): There are two or perhaps three scenes in Jeffrey Hunt’s occult teen horror film that suggest potential for at least mild creepiness. Unfortunately, these scenes are in a movie that mostly plays out like a mediocre (cable) TV movie, only that most TV movies nowadays don’t waste half of their running time before the actual plot starts. This one, alas, leaves us with thirty minutes of actual narrative and nearly an hour of various kinds of feet-dragging – and not any interesting kind of feet dragging. The acting’s less than helpful, too, with most of the young pretty things seeming out of their depth even when asked to portray even the most basic of emotions.

I can’t imagine who the supposed audience for this thing is – teen horror fans can do so much better, TV movie horror fans too, and the trash and gore hounds will fall asleep early and not miss out on anything.

Worry Dolls aka The Devil’s Dolls (2016): That does make Padraig Reynolds’s Southern US set horror film something like the star of this post. Despite a rather clunky script – just take as an example how the way the film decides to use to get the titular dolls into the wrong hands also makes the cop hero look like the most incompetent man alive or the treacly clichéd way the film portrays the guy’s relation to his little daughter – the film is at least entertaining, from time to time even moody, and certainly acted competently enough. There are also some rather neat bloody sequences as well as some well-realized suspense sequences that suggests – as did the director’s Rites of Spring – that Reynolds is just a decent script away from turning out a truly good movie.