Cru

Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971). A woman just released from psychiatric care, her husband, and their best friend and third move into a big old country house and immediately befriend the woman who's been squatting there. However, when Jessica starts seeing inexplicable things around the house, she's afraid her illness has returned.

From this description, one might conclude this is either about Mental Illness™ or ghosts, but in fact this is a vampire story. It's also a lot gayer than I expected at first, because the member of our household that squatter/vampire Emily is most interested in seducing is Jessica.

There's a lot of voiceover in this, either Jessica thinking to herself or Emily speaking to her telepathically. There's a lot of 70s color as the trio scandalizes the local populace by being hippies and driving around in a hearse. The husband sucks, as I feel is usual in these things. The title is kickass and IMO one of the more memorable things about the whole movie. ( spoilers )

In conclusion: it's fine.

--

Beware Bouina (2026). During their mission up the Amazon, a medical corps boat, including idealist Alli (Jessica Rothe from Happy Death Day) and local girl Lena (Kiana Madeira from the Fear Street movies) who's just searching for her brother, runs into both human trouble and a really big snake.

This was my most-anticipated movie of October even before I realized it was directed by Michael P Nelson, who directed the Silent Night Deadly Night reboot that I enjoyed so much. It sounds like the making of the movie was quite the experience, as they were really shooting on location in the Amazon. I feel like that's not the kind of expense that gets greenlit for a horror movie these days? I really enjoyed this interview with him about what that shoot was like.

Weirdly, after funding this moderately expensive horror movie, Lionsgate basically dumped it. My local theater only had one or two showings a day, and only for a week. Absolutely baffling.

Anyway, this was fun, and for my money much less cheesy than Anaconda (which I might just have seen way too late to properly appreciate). The characters all feel real, the CG is much better (a low bar), and it looks great. Like with The Odyssey earlier this year, the hindbrain knows that shit on the screen is real!

OTOH, the script, oooof. The plot kind of just lurches from one big event to the next, some of them feeling like either accidents or unrelated to the others. The fact that mostly people are against trying to hurt the snake means that the actual goal feels pretty muddled in the second half. At one point we grip the snake with a piece of heavy construction machinary, and it slips out easily, as one would expect given its size. It's just like, okay, what are you even trying to accomplish here?

One of the most-developed characters up to a certain point then gets eaten so unceremoniously that it took me a while to process they were actually dead. In general the movie inhabits this weird place where the characters are sympathetic and you're rooting for them, which I think is the Mike P Nelson touch, but then they still get treated like normall canon fodder, which makes things feel a bit pointless.

The worst, though, is the human antagonist who has a totally unmotivated heel-face turn in the last act. The movie tries to convince us that actually he's a good guy who went through a bad patch, but we have seen literally no evidence of this. He's just a huge waste of space in the story. I'd have liked him a lot better as a straight villain a la Jon Voight in Anaconda. It's another case where the movie seems kind of confused about what purpose its characters are supposed to serve in the narrative.

On a personal level, I really wanted the movie to lean more into the folk horror element.

Overall a good time despite its misteps, and it's not like there are a lot of watchable movies about giant snakes. I think it's basically gone from theaters already, but when it shows up on streaming you should check it out.

Still working through that backlog!! All I have left after these are the two I saw yesterday + the Oasis doc.

Hope (2026). A Korean movie about a small town near the border with North Korea disrupted by the appearance of very large, strong, and freaky alien monsters.

This is the purest sci-fi action monster movie I've seen in a long time. It kept reminding me of Independence Day, but this is a much smaller-scale movie, concerned entirely with this one town and its cast of residents, police officers, and local hicks toting illegal rifles. We spend the first forty minutes or so of the 160-minute runtime (oof) just chasing down the first monster, which is crashing through every building in town and entirely unfazed by a few bullets. The action is intense, breakneck, and generally well directed IMO.

This movie is doing a lot of things, and I'm not sure I totally understand all of them. I would love to hear from Korean folks or people more versed in Korean culture on some of them. There's the whole "redneck hunters as heroes" thing, which feels like it's borrowed from and/or maybe commenting on that same character type in American movies, as is the running joke about all these people using guns they should have no access to. There's the tone, which tends towards comedic in way that kept throwing me off guard, like the female police officer who responds to threats and conflict with a lot of OTT yelling like an anime character, or the whole sequence where our main policeman accidentally shoots a civilian, perhaps fatally, and then he and the guy he's hunting with argue about whose fault it was.

There's the fact that the aliens, when we properly encounter them, are all voiced and modeled on non-Asian actors like Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander. This probably is thematically related to the repeated theme early on in the film of signs and messaging around town warning people to watch for spies and invaders (from North Korea, I assume). And then, of course, there's the fact that ( big spoilers ) Also the fact that one of the last lines of the movie is (or at least was translated for English audiences as) a quote by an alien from the book of Hebrews about how hope is "the evidence of things not seen." What????

As mentioned, this movie is long, and while it kept things going at a steady clip throughout, it could definitely have been shorter. The characters are all very thin, and in a movie this long, it really feels like you should be able to give them at least some quirks that make them feel more real, even if you skip the Hollywoodesque sentimental backstory.

However, the movie's biggest weakness by far is the CG on the aliens. The designs are mostly okay, if a bit uncanny valley in places, but once they're in motion, OOF. Just awful. There's a point where one of them has had her leg literally blown off, and she's supposedly running on three limbs, but it's clear they just made the fourth one invisible because she's still moving like she has four. Brutal.

All that said, overall I had a good time and am glad I got to see it. I enjoyed the rural Korean setting, and a lot of the action set-pieces were top notch. If you want a big humans vs alien action movie, I recommend it.

-

Resident Evil (2026). Medical courier Bryan just found out his girlfriend is pregnant, and now before he can go home and work through that revelation with her, he has one last delivery to make to the isolated burg of Raccoon City.

This is the latest outing from Zach Cregger, director of Barbarian and Weapons, his first (and according to him, last) time tackling an existing IP. I had no interest in this when I first heard about it, but the trailer looked good and the reviews were stellar, so there I was on opening weekend.

I saw someone describe this as "empty calories" compared to Cregger's other movies, because those both have a LOT to chew on thematically, and this is kind of just a survival horror movie where the chances of survival keep getting worse and worse (inevitably, if you know even the basic premise of the game). And I do get that, but on the other hand: this is so much fun. If you want a survival horror romp, this is the movie for you.

The key is our main character Bryan, who's kind of a dumbass but so good-hearted. His survival instincts are extremely poor, but his impulse to help literally everyone he meets really drives the movie and makes the climax even more bitterly ironic. Austin Abrams plays him with so much charm and a ton of humor. Cregger's been quoted that after test audience feedback, he took out most of the jokes, which is really saying something because this movie still has many funny moments.

I will say it's wild to me that between this and Exit 8 I have now seen TWO video game adaptations this year that open with guys on the phone finding out their girlfriends are pregnant and then spending the whole movie working through that. In both cases the main characters are new ones created for the film, too. What's up with that.

Anyway, Cregger got asked to make a Resident Evil movie and he responded by creating an entirely standalone, canon-compliant story about his OC, and I respect that. I'm told it's also a real love letter to the franchise, with a lot of intention going into making it "feel" like a playing the games, which I can't comment on but certainly appreciate the spirit of.

On a personal level, I got very excited when Kali Reis (True Detective: Night Country) showed up for five minutes. I had no idea she was in it.

Overall: if you just want a fun ride for horror definitions thereof, I definitely recommend this.

-

Creepshow (1982). An anthology film written by Stephen King riffing on shlock horror comics from the 50s and including segments starring Leslie Nielsen, Ted Danson, and most memorably (IMO) King himself.

The motto of this movie is "it ain't over until we see some gnarly SFX prosthetics." The longest segment and the one that worked best for me is the one where Leslie Nielsen responds to his wife cheating on him by burying both her and the other man (Ted Danson) up their necks in sand and letting the tide drown them, which was all very effective and tense, not least because Nielsen is so terrifyingly affable about it all… and then the story kept going for another ten minutes because again, no crazy makeup prosthetics yet! Can't have that!

That said, the segment that's really going to stick with me is Stephen King playing a dumbass hick who gets infected by a glowing meteor, because the acting here is really, uh, it's something. I got onto the horror discord and was like WHAT IS HAPPENING. TO ME. Even having read this, I promise, you are not prepared for what you will experience if you watch this.

The other memorable segment defies the prosthetics motto, because it is instead about an evil Scrooge type terrified of germs and bugs whose clean room apartment has become infested with cockroaches, and friends, those sure are hundreds and hundreds of real live cockroaches on that set. Once you have them on set, I feel the key question is HOW DO YOU REMOVE THEM. Also, are there PETA guidelines for working with live insects? Many questions.

The other thing that struck me about the whole movie was how few women there were. On average I'd say King is really good with female characters, but here the only one who gets significant screentime is Adrienne Barbeau as an over the top drunken harridan who finally drives her husband to murder. It hit me when I was rewatching Insidious around the same time how nice it was to have multiple major female characters over the age of 50, and this has at least four or five men over that age and one female character total. Boo.

--

In a Violent Nature (2023). Some campers disturb a locket left at a fire tower, thus raising the violent undead spirit of a man killed there years earlier.

I've seen this described as a meta slasher. It is pure essence of slasher to an almost meditative degree; there's a lot of following Johnny from behind as he tromps through the forest. The sound design does a LOT of work here, because there isn't all that much dialogue.

There are some memorable kills here, all executed (heh) with a kind of plodding deadpan. Johnny is not angry or acting out of emotion; he simply is. The most memorable is what I will call the yoga kill (iykyk), but I think the one that worked the best for me is probably the one with the log splitter. If you're going to set a slasher at a defunct logging camp, gotta have a log splitter kill! And the grinding inevitability of the framing really works for that one in particular.

I also appreciated that the campers who run off to hook up and get picked off are two women this time.

I told someone going in that I expected to either love this or DNF it, but in fact I finished while feeling very little about it at all. In terms of meditative, dialogue-free horror, it turns out I'm much more into something like the maximalism of Mad God than this.