Companion

Year 18, Day 285 - 10/12/26 - Movie #5,459

BEFORE: After this I'm halfway through the horror chain for this year - this makes 12 out of 24. But how many horror films have I watched since I started this crazy project/habit? If this is Year 18 that means 17 years have gone before, a quick estimate of 30 films per year would make 510, which seems like a lot. The real number is probably less, because there were some years early on where I skipped the genre entirely, I wasn't really ready to get into it. And then in more recent times I've cut the number down because of vacations taken in October, combined with an inability to form a Shock Block that's more than 25 films long. 

A quick search by genre on IMDB's Advanced Search page tells me the number is more like 373, however I have a feeling that's a bit short because I've counted some films as horror films that the IMDB doesn't, they have this category called "psychological thriller" for films that aren't exactly about demons or monsters, films like "A Perfect Getaway" or tonight's film would not count as a horror film on IMDB, but I'll drop it in there. So possibly it's a bit closer to 400 films, which is pretty respectable, considering I didn't much care for horror films when I started this.

Sophie Thatcher carries over again from "Heretic", that film's going to be hard to beat. 

THE PLOT: A weekend getaway with friends at a remote cabin turns into chaos after it's revealed that one of the guests is not what they seem. 

AFTER: We're going to have to talk about A.I. now, or S.I. or whatever we'll be calling it a year from now. It's nothing new as a topic, we just figured through the 1980's and 1990's that in the future, there will be robots. Nobody saw drones coming back then, or mobile units that would deliver our food, and we imagined flying cars, not self-driving cars, but whatever. Really, "South Park" nailed it when they had Cartman pretend to be a robot named Awesom-O and adults kept asking him if he was a "pleasure robot".  The time between humans inventing something and then wondering if they can sleep with it gets shorter and shorter, so yeah, at some point we'll be. combining the Real Dolls with robotics and it won't be perfect, not at first anyway - the only question really is "How soon?"

There are clues from the start that this woman is a robot, she's got an uncanny insight into the weather, speaks many languages and says things like "I just wasn't built that way" even if she's mostly unaware that she is a robot, (or an artificial human, or maybe "synthetic individual" will be in fashion when the time comes). Honestly, I was aiming for the "M3GAN" movie and I kind of missed, I got here first. That other one's harder to link to and I don't imagine the sequel will make it any easier. Iris is programmed to love Josh, and she's programmed with a generic meet-cute memory of how they first encountered each other at the grocery store. As we learned in last night's film, when you remember something you're really basing your memory on the last time you thought of that event, not the actual event itself, but perhaps it's a different story if the memory is a file on your internal hard drive. 

There's no year mentioned here, of course, because nobody knows when this technology will be viable, to allow a robot into your home and it cooks for you, does whatever you want (yeah, even THAT) and it showers and dresses itself and believes itself to be human. Over time, it may become self-aware enough to figure out its identity from the clues in the situationship, but it depends on how high you set its intelligence meter. If you want to have intellectual conversations about Tolstoy novels and Bergman films, set the dial all the way up to 100%, but then your "F-bot" might be smart enough to realize it's a robot. Whoopsie, but you can reset it to factory defaults just by holding your thumb behind its right ear for five seconds. Either way, you've got a companion droid that is imprinted on you and you alone, it's not going to cheat on you (umm, unless you want it to, you sick freak) and you can make it do all the cooking and cleaning and grocery shopping - if you're basic and stuck in those outdated gender roles. 

You can then go about your business and work late and take time for yourself and not have to worry about your companion, they'll be there for you when you need them, and if you're tired or just want to be alone, you can just say, "Go to sleep" and they'll shut down for a while. You know, it's probably best to keep them on a normal human-like shutdown cycle, it helps their battery life if they recharge on a daily basis. 

Josh has "modded" his F-bot, though, sure that's what some people do with their cell phones or computers, but if you're not careful, you could damage the device that way. What Josh did was remove the part of her programming that prevented her from harming humans (through action or inaction), and really that was Rule #1 of robotics, according to Isaac Asimov. Rule #2 was obeying orders from humans UNLESS doing so interfered with Rule #1 and Rule #3 was self-preservation, unless that interfered with Rules 1 & 2. It's important to mention this as we stand on the cusp of the A.I. revolution, and people are randomly making claims that A.I. can "kill everyone" within a certain number of years. THIS is why the industry needs safeguards, as eventually people are going to get tired of just using A.I. to make fake porn and we get more closer to wanting to have actual sex with robots. 

Once the safeguards are gone, Iris finds herself in a situation where someone else at the lake house wants to, umm, make use of her talents, and she does not exactly know how to react, she knows that she only wants to be with Josh, so attention from someone else is technically sexual assault, and she defends herself, accidentally un-aliving someone, as the kids say these days on the interwebs. No spoilers beyond this point because I think some of the plot twists are pretty good here, and I'm not going to give them away. But the character remains sympathetic here for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that somebody messed with her programming. 

Iris, now aware that she is an artificial being, manages to get Josh's phone in order to use the app to increase her intelligence, now at least she may be able to think her way out of this, rather than be collected by the robot manufacturers and decommissioned or re-programmed. She determines that if she can make it to Josh's self-driving car, she can get home or drive somewhere else and start a new life for herself, only it's just not going to be easy with Josh and others trying to stop her, as part of a larger scheme. 

I mean, there's a lot to think about here - we've come a long way since "The Terminator" (there are some obvious visual references here to "Terminator 2") and also a long way from "Ex Machina" - I don't know if we're ever going to get HERE, because films set in the future often act as cautionary tales, and thus they maybe prevent the events depicted from happening. I guess we'll all find out together. 

Directed by Drew Hancock

Also starring Jack Quaid (last seen in "Novocaine"), Lukas Gage (last seen in "Smile 2"), Megan Suri (last seen in "72 Hours"), Harvey Guillen (last heard in "The Garfield Movie"), Rupert Friend (last seen in "Jurassic World: Rebirth"), Jaboukie Young-White (last heard in "Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken"), Matt McCarthy (last heard in "The Angry Birds Movie"), Marc Menchaca (last seen in "The Creator"), Woody Fu, and the voice of Ashley Lambert (last heard in "The Bad Guys 2").

RATING: 6 out of 10 available language options

Heretic

Year 18, Day 284 - 10/11/26 - Movie #5,458

BEFORE: Well, I greatly enjoyed my extra day off today, courtesy of the WNBA. No Liberty game today because the Atlanta Dream swept the best-of-five playoff round, instead I got to go to Long Island with my wife where she bought cigarettes, then we did some shopping and had a nice lunch at Texas Roadhouse. I've still got three shifts at the theater before we go out of town for a week, and we've got her birthday this week, I'm hoping to do a focus group to raise a little extra cash, and tomorrow's one of those former holidays that's fallen out of favor. 

I'm getting a little worried because the President is talking about doing away with daylight savings time, and I have said in the past that I would support any candidate who would take that position, so now I'm wondering if I have to become a Trump supporter to avoid being called a hypocrite. I think my only possible out here is the fact that he's not suggesting we do it for any logical reason, like the fact that it doesn't save energy or lives, he just wants to scrap it because it's too hard for him to change the clocks twice a year, or he's tired of paying people to do that for him and he's too dumb to figure it out. Another possible out is that he's talking about just keeping DST in place all year round, rather than switching back to Standard Time and staying there, which would make more sense. 

I know what you're thinking, it doesn't matter, because he can't run for President again - I firmly believe that he WILL, despite what the Constitution says. And anyway, Presidents are allowed 10 years in office, not 8, which is a codicil in place to help anyone who was a Vice President who became President when someone else died - they can have up to two years after ascending and then serve two full terms. So I think Trump WILL run again, and Michael Bloomberg has already shown him how to do it. Bloomberg was the mayor of NYC for two terms, and then ran a third time, which should have been illegal due to term limits, but he changed his party to Independent, as if that made him a different person or something, and then ran again and won again. Nobody stopped him, nobody sued him, there was no class-action taken against him, and so Trump could easily pull the same trick. By the time the courts settled everything, he'd be midway through his third term. It could happen - now THAT's nightmare fuel. 

Sophie Thatcher carries over from "MaXXXine". 

THE PLOT: Two young Mormon women are drawn into a game of cat-and-mouse in the house of a strange man. 

AFTER: This is a very clever film, all in all. It kind of serves as both a horror film and a treatise on comparative religion, which kind of is the biggest casualty here. After a pair of Mormon women visit a man who says he is possibly interested in converting, they end up debating with him over the finer points of religious theory, and then realize they are essentially trapped in his house, with no means of escape. The front door is locked, and the man, Mr. Reed, says it's on a timer, much like a bank vault, and it can't be opened. Furthermore, there is metal in the walls which prevents their cell phones from working, and one presumes that the house is also sound-proofed and such. Uh oh, this is starting to seem a bit like "The Black Phone". 

Sisters Barnes and Preston are welcome to leave if they want, at some point they've figured out that pretty much everything Reed has said is a lie, like he said his wife was in the other room but she's very shy, and she's made them some delicious blueberry pie - but now they're assuming that there's no wife (which means they broke their Mormon rules by entering a house with no woman in it) and even worse, there's probably not any pie, either. Reed suggests they leave via the back door of the house, only they'd have to work their way through several rooms and hallways, and God only knows what might be back there. This guy might have a sacrificial altar or a torture chamber back there, or worse. 

But no, it's just a library, and there are in fact two doors in back, but they'll have to choose the right one, and listen to another speech about the true meaning of religion. Yep, that really sounds worse, why couldn't it have been a torture chamber? Reed already knows a great deal about the Book of Mormon, in fact he seems to have studied ALL of the world's religions, allegedly in his search for the best one. But I think something funny happens when you study all of the religions, you might come to the conclusion that they're all false, which sure, seems likely, or even weirder, maybe they're all true. Maybe gods draw their power from believers, so maybe Yahweh and Jesus and Buddha and Satan are all in competition with each other to see who can get the most followers. But that's crazy, right? Anyway if you discount one religion as bunk you kind of have to discount all of them, it's the simplest answer, Occam's Razor, there is no God. The universe came about naturally and science explains the stars and the planets and life exists on Earth only because we're a certain distance from the sun and it developed over millions of years and stopped developing once we had television. Devolution NOW!

Ah, but it's not that simple. After an explanation about the "iterations" of religion that uses both the board game Monopoly and the song "Creep" by Radiohead as touchpoints, Reed offers the women two choices - one door marked "Belief" and one marked "Disbelief". Note that neither one is labeled "Exit". If they believe in religion they should choose accordingly, and if they're willing to admit their religion is bogus, they should choose the other door. Yeah, I pretty much picked up early on the fact that neither door was going to lead them outside. This guy is either a genius or a madman, or possibly both, and he's got a bunch of tunnels in his house that we haven't seen since the Minotaur's maze in ancient Crete, or possibly the passages seen in the film "Barbarian". Why do the stairs lead DOWN? Oh, because he lives at the top of a hill. Sure, and if you believe Moses parted the Red Sea and Jesus walked on water, I suppose you'll believe anything. 

It's also worth pointing out that if you don't believe in any of the religions, then you also don't believe in sin, and under those parameters, what evil would someone be capable of doing? There would really be no limit under those conditions, and that's kind of what we're dealing with here. Such a person would kill these women, or rape them, or keep them locked up for his own amusement. Geez, and he seemed like such a nice guy at first, too, but that's kind of the point. What evils lurk in the hearts of man? Only the Shadow knows...and this guy. I don't want to give away too much here, because this really needs to be experienced, but in a way it reminds me of "The Menu" or "Opus" or "The Black Phone" in that one really unhinged person is running the show, however he wants, and all the other people can do is play along and hope to find a way out, choose their moment or whatever. As long as that person has his audience, someone to hear his views on the world and what a messed-up place it is, not to mention that everything you think you know about life and death and the afterlife is probably wrong. 

Or is it? Some of the events that follow would seem to suggest that there IS something beyond death, only it's also very possible that it's just another deception, a magic trick of sorts. Which is all that religion really is, in the end, it's not even a magic trick, it's a belief in magic tricks that somebody did thousands of years ago, like appear to die and get resurrected, or appear to turn water into wine or appear to make a blind man see. And then somebody came along and said, "Wow, that was a really good magic trick, I should write that one down because I think we can build a religion around that, and sell people the promise of eternal life while we take their money." Come on, deep down you know it's true. And I say this as someone raised Catholic, I was an altar boy and my father was a deacon and my mother was the church organist. But at some point I decided to think for myself and see that the religion was based on the story of the magic tricks. 

To believe that there is no God, other than the one humans created in their stories, yeah, it's truly terrifying. It means that maybe there's nothing after this world, you die and that's it, you're done and there will be things you never got to accomplish and quite possible the world will forget about you unless you did something really spectacular or extraordinary. But that's also very liberating, I mean you can still pray if you want and wish for good things to happen to you or to other people, just bear in mind that nobody is listening and it has no effect on changing reality. It might make you feel good to hope for good things, but it's probably more effective to try and make good things happen yourself. And there's an upside, if there's no God then there's no Satan, no demons or vengeful angels or an eternity of burning in hell or being bored in heaven. Then there are no monsters except savage animals, terrible people and the ones in our imagination. 

There is one other possibility, which this film also raises, if only for a few minutes - that the world is a simulation or some kind of advanced computer program that we're all living in, "Matrix"-style. Then if we die in this reality, we're out of the program and we still exist somewhere larger, and that's our true form. Well, either we find a glitch in the matrix and prove that our reality isn't really real, or we just keep on going and we'll find out at the end whether there's anything else. The saving grace is that if there's nothing else, we won't be aware of it, we'll be blissfully unaware. Sorry to harsh your mellow but still feel free to check out the film, it's got some good ideas in it. A lot of bad nasty stuff too, but you know, some good ideas. This is probably the type of film you get after the "Saw" franchise makes a jillion dollars, but I haven't seen those films yet, I've been avoiding them. 

Directed by Scott Beck (director of "65") & Bryan Woods (ditto)

Also starring Hugh Grant (last seen in "Paddington in Peru"), Chloe East (last seen in "The Fabelmans"), Topher Grace (last seen in "Under the Silver Lake"), Elle Young (last seen in "A Score to Settle"), Julie Lynn Mortensen, Haylie Hansen, Elle McKinnon (last seen in "Wonder"), Hanna Huffman, Anesha Bailey (last seen in "The Interview"), Miguel Castillo, Stephanie Lavigne, Wendy Gorling,

RATING: 7 out of 10 loose wooden matches

MaXXXine

Year 18, Day 283 - 10/10/26 - Movie #5,457

BEFORE: If I'm posting late today, it's because I'm going out to a beer festival in Brooklyn, which I hope turns out to be better than the one I went to in Staten Island last month, the one that ran out of beer - and BBQ - after about an hour and a half. Really, really poor planning, I must say - or was it? I noticed that the people with VIP tickets were still being served while those of us with general admission tickets got generally screwed. Anyway, I'm hoping to make up for that today by drinking ALL the beer, and we'll see how long it takes me to find my way home and recover. We're going to find out. 

Kevin Bacon carries over from "They/Them".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "X" (Movie #4,879") and "Pearl" (Movie #4,880)

THE PLOT: In 1980's Hollywood, adult film star and aspiring actress Maxine Minx finally gets her big break. But as a mysterious killer stalks L.A., a trail of blood threatens to reveal her sinister past. 

AFTER: OK, I'm back from the beer festival, but it took me MUCH longer than it should have to get home. My usual subway train, the one I live closest to, is down for the weekend, I knew that going in, but of course I didn't know that back when I bought the ticket. So I had to figure out a combination of two buses to get to this particular place in Brooklyn, one bus I was already familiar with and the other one, not so much, but what's to know? I just needed to know where it linked up with the one I usually take to go drinking at the Navy Yard and how far it would drop me from today's event. I got there in 90 minutes, OK I was a tiny bit late, but not much - and why did it take me over two and a half hours to get home? The event ended at 4:30 pm and I didn't walk into the house until 7:15 or so. I'm pretty sure I didn't black out somewhere, I was getting more and more sober during the trip home, it's just that the damn bus has to stop every two blocks to let people out, and the subway just doesn't. That's got to be it. I did pop into a restaurant and use their restroom between buses (and it's a good thing I did) but that doesn't account for the missing hour. Then I took a two-hour nap when I got home, so really, that's the whole day gone. BUT I have tomorrow free, the NY WNBA team, the Liberty, lost the second round of the playoffs, so Sunday's shift is cancelled. I really had mixed feelings, like I wanted to root for the team but I was also kind of rooting for an extra day off. Oh well, I volunteered for that shift, so I still get points for stepping up.

Anyway, I watched "X" and "Pearl" two Octobers ago (Mia Goth's birthday is October 25, please wish her well) and at that time I debated whether I should go out of my way to watch the third film in the pseudo-series, I think it was just on HBO Max at the time, which was maybe called just "Max" at the time. But I had my chain to Christmas all figured out, and I didn't want to drop anything, so I passed on "MaXXXine". I figured as long as I circled back to it within five years, no big deal, and it only took me two - AND this film serves a purpose by getting me closer to my final destination this month, which will be the "Final Destination" movies at long last. You see that, it turns out that The Chain was playing the long game, it saved this movie for when I needed it, it's funny that way and I should trust it more. Like tonight I'm tempted to get off the path I'm on because I see how this film could link to the recent "Frankenstein" film (via Mia Goth) and the more recent "Weapons" (via Clayton Farris). But then I don't think I'd make it back to the "Final Destination" films in time, so I'm going to go with my gut and save those films for a future year, perhaps they'll link up with each other or more films in two or three years time. 

So today I'm closing the book on the "X" trilogy, where Mia Goth played a couple different characters, both Maxine and Pearl, who was the older lady in "X" and then "Pearl" went back in time to tell us her twisted killer back-story. I'm sure every actor would love to be in a series like this, where they play a few different characters and do a lot of weird stuff to show their range, it's like Michael J. Fox in "Back to the Future" and if you're lucky, you get like ONE of these in your career, unless you're Eddie Murphy, in which case you can have as many as you want. But let's focus on Maxine and Pearl. Maxine was the only survivor of that Texas adult film star massacre a few years back in 1979, and apparently she's still a person of interest, because somebody is roaming around the seedy streets of L.A. looking for her. I mean, you can watch this film without knowing what exactly went down before, but for the full effect, you really need to watch all three movies. 

This final (?) film in the series is set in 1985, during the real-life killings of the Night Stalker, and honestly it's a bit unclear at times whether the stalker seen in this film is the SAME Night Stalker that was in the real-life news, or a different one. I mean, the ending here makes it kind of clear that there were two people, and one was specifically looking for Maxine Mink, for reasons. I'm just saying that there are a lot of killings in this film, and they don't break down exactly which ones were done by the Night Stalker and which were done by the Maxine Stalker. Anyway, Maxine's friends who are also strippers and/or porn stars keep trying to get her to join them at a party somewhere in the Hollywood Hills, there's a rich guy in from out of town who's paying girls a lot of money, but then some of them start turning up missing, or dead and dumped in a very nice cemetery with Satanic symbols carved into them. 

This couldn't have come at a worse time, Maxine has just landed a role in a REAL (non-porn) movie - OK, it's a horror movie but those are good too, a lot of actors got their break from being in horror movies. Jamie Lee Curtis, John Travolta and that Bacon fellow too, I think. So Maxine is not going to let some stalker killing her friends ruin her chances of becoming a household name. Yeah, umm, sorry, but you can't really expect to be a household name after doing x-rated films, unless you're Sylvester Stallone I guess. But other people like Marilyn Chambers and Ron Jeremy could only go so far. (Side note, with NY Comic Con going on right now, today could be the anniversary of the time we had a real porn star signing stuff in our booth, it was Julia Ann. She got a lot of attention and drew a bunch of people to come see our DVDs.)

The stalker leaves behind a VHS tape which contains the "Farmer's Daughters" film that Maxine and her now-dead friends were trying to make six years before, as if somebody's trying to blackmail her or link her to those murders. A private investigator then contacts her in person and tells her to be at a specific address that night, or her past will be revealed to everyone. But rather than go to that address, Maxine contacts her agent, who steps in and makes sure that private investigator meets an untimely end in a car crusher. Very "Grand Theft Auto". But all of this is still making her late for work on "Puritan II" and disappointing that film's director, who's threatening to replace her in the role. 

So she decides to resolve things over the weekend, she eventually DOES go to that address, with a couple of cops following her, and well, no spoilers. This film doesn't have that many secrets left and I'm not going to blow them here. But all in all, this is kind of weak sauce compared with what went down in "X" and to a lesser extent, "Pearl". Diminishing returns on sequels, I suppose, or perhaps someone was just running out of story and trying to extend what didn't need to be extended. The director initially teased that there would be a fourth film, but has since changed his plans. Well, we do have to prioritize, and "Smile 3" is maybe a little bit more important, don't you think? 

Nice cameo from the "Psycho" house, though, it's good to see a Hitchcock reference these days. There's also a house here that appeared in the movie "Body Double". 

Directed by Ti West (director of "X" and "Pearl")

Also starring Mia Goth (last seen in "Infinity Pool"), Elizabeth Debicki (last heard in "Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway"), Moses Sumney (last seen in "Creed"), Michelle Monaghan (last seen in "The Best of Me"), Bobby Cannavale (last seen in "Unstoppable"), Halsey (last heard in "Sing 2"), Lily Collins (last seen in "Mank"), Giancarlo Esposito (last seen in "The Electric State"), Simon Prast (last seen in "X"), Sophie Thatcher (last seen in "The Tomorrow Man"), Uli Latukefu (last seen in "Next Goal Wins"), Chloe Farnworth (last seen in "Nostalgia"), Deborah Geffner (last seen in "Southside with You"), Ned Vaughn (last seen in "The Best of Enemies"), Larry Fessenden (last heard in "Killers of the Flower Moon"), Toby Huss (last seen in "Sword of Trust"), Charley Rowan McCain, Daniel Lench, Brad Swanick, Susan Pingleton (last seen in "Shadows and Fog"), Zachary Mooren (last seen in "Cat Person"), Marcus Lavoi (last seen in "Den of Thieves"), Taylor Kowalski (last seen in "The Secret Life of Bees"), Pegah Rashti, Alison Wonderland, Kristin Carey (last seen in "Dumb Money"), Cecilia Kim, Clayton Farris, Chelsea Brea, Vera Myers (last seen in "The Fabelmans"), Meredith VanCuyk, Allen Waiserman 

and archive footage of Ronald Reagan (last seen in "Reggie"), Tipper Gore and Dee Snider. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 religious protestors

They/Them

Year 18, Day 282 - 10/9/26 - Movie #5,456

BEFORE: I'm already 1/3 of the way through this year's ShockBlock, since I'll be out of town for a week later in the month I'm limiting myself to 24 films this year - but it took a great deal of planning just to come up with a chain of 24, I don't think 30 was possible given the (slowly) dwindling list of horror films. I think I can only maintain this for 6 or 7 more years, tops. 

Kevin Bacon carries over from "Leave the World Behind", because of course he does. Really, if you check IMDB, Kevin Bacon hasn't been in THAT many movies, I know that goes against conventional wisdom, because of that game we think that he's connected to everyone and he's been in darn near everything, but the numbers don't support that. I'm a big fan and I've even seen his band play live, but when you take out short films, TV shows and music videos, he's been in what, 75 or 77 movies? It's still a lot, but it's hardly a record number. Really, it's quality over quantity and I respect that. He's popped up here at the Movie Year only 33 or so times, just saying. 

Part of life is about coming full circle, I think - wasn't Kevin Bacon in one of the early early "Friday the 13th" movies, way back when? I've been avoiding those films...

THE PLOT: A group of teenagers at an LGBTQ+ conversion camp endures unsettling psychological techniques while being stalked by a mysterious masked killer. 

AFTER: The proper way to say the name of this film is "They-SLASH-Them", which has to be some kind of play on words, given the appearance of a "slasher" character at the camp. Very clever, and this film is clever in many ways, across the board. Taking down the whole gay conversion thing, which is definitely a sacred cow that needs to be turned into cheeseburgers, even if those are meatless cheeseburgers with soy cheese on them. Jesus, even I know that's a bunch of B.S., you can't "pray the gay away" and even the suggestion that you can is offensive to a whole bunch of people. What a bunch of hypocrites the boomers are, maybe even the millennials too, because everybody started telling their kids they could grow up to be anything they wanted to be, only, umm, not THAT. How many times have we seen even liberal parents who don't want their kids to be gay or trans or non-binary because it's not what THEY know, it's not what THEY want for their kids. Well, shut up because it's just not about you any more, is it? 

I remember being 21 and at college and still a virgin (not for lack of trying, but you know, I did kind of give up after a while) and I couldn't WAIT to start my life again as a sexually active person - so I imagine for gay people it's twice as bad, there's this feeling inside you and experiences you want to have and society keeps telling you no, you can't have that or you should not feel that way. Of course, I saw the other side of that a few years later when my first wife came out, and I was the one saying, "No, you can't have that" or "You should not feel that way." I soon realized how futile that was, once the door was opened and those feelings were expressed, there was very little I could do about it but show her the door and then try to move on. My experiences are my own, though, as well as my personal feelings about people coming out or having new gender identities or preferences or whatever. But I try above all to be respectful of other people's processes and transitions. Just this week I was managing the event with drag kind Murray Hill, and I'm pretty sure they were born female, but I noticed they used the men's room, and I'm fine with it, whatever. I'm not going to bust anyone, everyone should feel comfortable in their own skin, even if they're so far into another persona that they can't be seen out of costume. You can identify as Batman if you want and use Bruce Wayne as your cover, I don't care. 

Anyway, there are a few kind of clever things going on here - obviously there's an attempt to get in on the zeitgeist, with so many people these days identifying as queer or trans or non-binary, I mean I think it was a lot simpler back in my day, you were either one thing or another, male or female, gay or straight, attached or single. Now there's not just space in-between, there are many different spaces in-between, all with different names, for all the people who just feel like they're NOT one thing or the other, but something else. It's kind of like there used to be just Republicans and Democrats, and now we have Liberal Republicans and Conservative Democrats and then there are socialist Democrats and Reform Republicans, and then some people who don't want to join either party or any party at all. Anarchy, that's kind of what it is, and I mean there's gender anarchy, too. Maybe it's all good long-term, who can say? A film reflects the time when it's made, though, so this film is going to TRY to represent what's going on in the anarchy of gender, but still it's got to at least appear "woke" and not break any taboos. Time was you could spot the killer in a movie, it was probably the messed-up queer person, you know, because they're messed up. Remember how Norman Bates dressed up like his mother? We can't say for sure that the character was gay (the actor, sure) but he did wear a dress, and in those days, that was enough. 

Times have certainly changed, and you probably can't make a gay person the killer any more, that would be homophobic and non-representative. This was probably taken into consideration when writing out this screenplay. What's weirder is that I don't think they allowed gay characters to be portrayed as the victims, either, because that would be similarly non-productive, and it would have been taken as TOO representative - "Oh, so you mean all gay people are weak and can't defend themselves, is THAT the takeaway?" It just feels like some screenwriter had to walk a very fine line here, because anything it says about one gay character is going to be taken as a slam against ALL queer people, like most other stereotypes (Mexicans are lazy, British people are stuffy, French people are promiscuous) there was a time when they were used as story shortcuts, but mostly you just can't do that any more. 

There are some good points made here too, like how is a camp going to work with a male dorm and a female dorm if you've got males who used to be females and vice versa? Do you just let everyone go by their birth gender, or their current anatomy, or how they identify?  Jordan, the main character here, is non-binary, so that's a big problem, they don't know which dorm to sleep in. The camp counselors here are accommodating though, maybe a little TOO accommodating. Never forget that they're still a gay conversion camp, no matter what they say, their goal is to make gay people less gay or more straight, or at the very least, to make them feel bad about themselves. So whatever slasher is stalking people in the woods, the real evil here is the camp itself, we can't lose sight of that. But who would have a problem with the gay conversion camp and its staff? JK, there's probably a long list of people. 

On day two, one camp attendee is outed as trans, and forced to change dorms. That should really tell you all you need to know about the staff, they're playing by the old rules, and judging people according to their birth anatomy, not how they identify. Well, there are the old school people and some of them are not doing their best to learn the new rules of society. After group therapy, where each camper needs to explain who they are and why they're in conversion camp, the camp therapist (the wife of the head counselor) does her best to belittle each one of them in private sessions and make them ashamed of their queerness. Again, not cool, so at some point I think we're all rooting for the slasher. The next day the boys (and those who identify as boys) are taken out to shooting practice while the girls (and those who identify as girls) are taught how to bake a cherry pie. The staff just seems to be riding them at every opportunity, trying to reinforce the old gender rules on them, that may work on some of them, but it won't work on ALL of them.

By the time that evidence is found that beatings and torture were commonplace at Camp Whistler, at least in the past, the campers are ready to try and escape the camp, maybe the only thing preventing them is the fact that nobody knows what lurks in the woods, and who the slasher is ultimately trying to kill. That's all that I'll say about the plot, but I might have already tipped a few things here, because we already know that this film is going to be queer-positive in the end, which kind of limits the story possibilities and it's not hard to figure out what's going to happen to the camp in the end. In this day and age of equality and anarchy and (eventual) acceptance, there's really no other way. I'll give it an extra point for being ground-breaking and willing to "go there", wherever "there" is, but then I kind of have to take away a point for tying itself up in so much wokeness that the story really trips over itself. 

Directed by John Logan

Also starring Theo Germaine, Anna Chlumsky (last seen in "The End of the Tour"), Carrie Preston (last seen in "The Holdovers"), Quei Tann, Austin Crute (last seen in "Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul."), Anna Lore (last seen in "Black Phone 2"), Monique Kim, Cooper Koch, Darwin del Fabro, Hayley Griffith, Boone Platt (last seen in "The Gray Man"), Mark Ashworth (last seen in "The Dirt"), Brooke Jane Taylor (last seen in "Reptile"), Steven Anthony Washington, Sofia Palmero (last seen in "You're Cordially Invited"), Jack Caron (ditto), Destiny Danielle, Noe Cameron, Sofia Riba, Heaven Lupita Stamps, Juan de Jesus, Janelle Beaudry, Karin Justman, Scott Andersen (last seen in "A Family Affair"), Dominic Bell, Bailey MB (last seen in "The Electric State") and the voice of Kiki Lee, 

RATING: 5 out of 10 pairs of handcuffs (used in a team-building exercise)

Leave the World Behind

Year 18, Day 281 - 10/8/26 - Movie #5,455

BEFORE: When people learn that I watch horror movies all through October, they ask, "Wow, don't you get nightmares?" Well, no, not really, nothing similar to the movies I watch, though that did happen when I was a kid, I had nightmares about Dracula and Frankenstein's monster and a few killer ones after watching "Poltergeist". Last night I did have a stress dream for sure, but it was a work-related one. In the dream I found out that my ex-co-workers were all back working for my ex-boss, the animator, at the studio where I worked for 31 years. So then I was back there too, in solidarity I guess, or perhaps I was hanging out and got tricked into working there again, I just know I felt the stress once again of running an animation studio that is always running out of money, and I felt the fear of not knowing how much longer the company can stay in business without income. Then this kind of morphed into the "city dream", I had to get across town for work and while it definitely looked like a city, none of the buildings or streets were familiar. 

Ah, I just found out that the New York Comic Con has started, this explains a lot, my body and my brain are still in that mode of expecting this big event around this time each year. I wasn't even consciously aware of the exact dates, but somehow my brain knew and it tormented me with the stress dream of working in the studio, packing up the merch and getting it all across town to the Javits Center. Thanks a lot, brain. 

Ethan Hawke carries over again from "Daybreakers", that's five in a row, that's enough. 

THE PLOT: A family's getaway to a luxurious rental home takes an ominous turn when a cyberattack knocks out their devices and two strangers appear at their door. 

AFTER: This film is three years old, it's probably been on the main list and the horror sub-list for nearly that long, but you know, that's how long it takes sometimes to get to something after it's on the list. I've already crossed off numerous films this Movie Year that have been on the list for five times that or even longer. Three years is nothing, really. "Daybreakers" has probably been kicking around the list for a while, getting that one sorted was something of an accomplishment, look how many Ethan Hawke horror films I had to schedule just to cross THAT one off!  

At first I thought this was going to be something of a "Bird Box"-like film, you know, the one with Sandra Bullock facing off against aliens or whatever that nobody could see - which itself was something of a knock-off of "A Quiet Place". But this one isn't like that at all, despite similarly having an A-list actress who hasn't done a lot of horror films. Then I thought maybe this is more like "The Rental" or "Barbarian", where people are forced to share space due to a mix-up with the rental agency or the AirBnB site and it leads to a bunch of mistrust and some other bad, nasty things. And this is SORT OF like that, only this is maybe more like "Knock at the Cabin" where people are vacationing peacefully when they're visited by strangers or strange things and they learn that maybe the apocalypse is taking place back in the cities.  

Look, I don't know why Julia Roberts would take a role as a racist Karen, I really don't. She's actually pitched as someone who hates ALL people at first, except maybe her husband and kids, but that's not really a good look either, is it? She definitely has some mistrust for the people who show up unannounced and claim to be the owners of the house, is this BECAUSE they're black or is that just a coincidence? Sure, I get it, you rented the house and didn't expect the owners (or whoever) to drop by, but since there's kind of a big emergency of sorts going on in the world, I think maybe you have to make some allowances, just saying. 

For the first half hour of the film (the first day at the rented vacation home) the only big problem is that the cable and internet are out. I mean, not working at all, no on-screen message from the cable company or the internet provider, no timeline for the service coming back, everything's just dead. I mean, you take a vacation so you can re-connect with your spouse and kids, right? And if everybody's on their phones and screens, that's counter-productive. So it's not really a big deal at first, let's get some groceries, drink some wine, play a couple board games and then tomorrow we'll make some inquiries about when the service will be restored. Ah, but that's not all, the GPS systems are out, there's no news available on the phone about whatever emergency is going on in the city, and if it's a blackout, sure, we get it, but you'd think at least you could turn on a battery-powered radio and get some kind of update, but nope. 

The owner of the house, G.H. Scott, and his daughter are allowed to stay the night (in their own house) despite Amanda's protests. Scott offers to refund them half of their rental fee, which is a good deal as long as they get to stay there and sleep in the best bedrooms. Well, they are all settled in there, and this way nobody has to go find a hotel. The next day Clay will drive into town and get a newspaper or some kind of update on the situation, and Mr. Scott will visit his neighbors and check in on them. Yeah, this is a terrible idea because the GPS systems aren't working either, so Clay gets lost and G.H. learns that his neighbors' house has been destroyed by flood and impact damage caused by so many planes crashing into the beach. So pretty much any plane in the sky over the East Coast at the time of the blackout was unable to land safely. And if the GPS is out, that means the satellites were hacked or taken offline, so how far does this thing go? 

The next few acts of the film are filled with a bunch of "WTF?" moments, somehow the event is messing with the migratory patterns of animals, so there are deer congregating HERE and a bunch of flamingos gathering over THERE, it's tough to say where they came from, because you don't usually see a bunch of flamingos on Long Island. Then a tremendous noise shrill noise is heard everywhere, hurting everyone's eardrums, and nobody can determine what's causing it or what effect it will have on them. Attempts to drive back to New York City are thwarted by a highway full of self-driving Teslas that have gone rogue and crashed into each other, filling up the Long Island Expressway. So it's really hard for the two families to determine if they'll be better off just staying indoors and not going anywhere, or if they should be taking some other actions to protect themselves. 

NITPICK POINT: Once you go any real distance out on Long Island, it's impossible to see the NYC skyline. We're led to believe that these people drove out almost to the Hamptons but yet somehow can still see what's happening in Manhattan, and nope, that's just not possible. Like I live in Queens, NY and I can see the Manhattan skyline, technically I am ON Long Island, but what most people consider to be "Long Island" is further east, and the Hamptons are about 90 miles east, there's just no way they would be able to see the skyline of Manhattan. 

The question remains, who had the resources to carry out this cyber-attack, if that's indeed what it was. The Iranians, the Koreans, the Soviets? Don't really expect any clear answers here, because the movie is not only way too long, it still finds a way to end before anything is solved or resolved. No spoilers here, but damn, what a waste of over two hours if there's no real resolution and we're left to wonder about the fates of the characters. I'm also going to go right into panic mode the next time my cable and internet are out, that's for sure. Bigger questions remain also, like who lives in that shed? Where did the deer all go? What was the Spanish woman saying? And should I be stocking up on canned food and bottled water? 

Directed by Sam Esmail

Also starring Julia Roberts (last seen in "Love Again"), Mahershala Ali (last seen in "Jurassic World: Rebirth"), Myha'la (last seen in "Dumb Money"), Farrah Mackenzie (last seen in "Please Stand By"), Charlie Evans, Kevin Bacon (last seen in "Marty, Life Is Short"), Alexis Rae Forlenza (last seen in "The King of Staten Island"), Vanessa Aspillaga (last seen in "Morning Glory"), Josh Drennen (last seen in "Madame Web"), Erica Cho (last seen in "Nyad"), Orli Gottesman, Sam Esmail,

RATING: 5 out of 10 shelves of DVDs, which do not require the internet to be watched (YES! I'll be well prepared when this day comes!)

Daybreakers

Year 18, Day 280 - 10/7/26 - Movie #5,454

BEFORE: I've been inching closer to becoming a "freegan" of sorts over the last couple weeks. No, I have not been eating food found in the trash or that I got from dumpster diving behind a grocery store, I'm talking about living off of food that was served at events at the theater and then left behind by the event hosts. First there was a Broadway Cares benefit screening that had a pretty good food spread for the attendees (potential donors) and while I didn't eat anything AT the event (they threw out most of the food which had been sitting on tables in the lobby for a couple hours, for safety reasons) I did find a whole box of cooked cocktail shrimp in the fridge after, they had donated bottled water and whatever was in the fridge to the theater, which was easier than taking it with them. I had two solid meals at home that were just shrimp and cocktail sauce, which I love. 

Then there was a "Best of 2026" screening as part of the After School Special week, featuring recent films made by student filmmakers and animators, and again, there was a catered reception in the lobby. While I didn't work that event, I was there the next day and the fridge was full again, with a sign saying "Staff - help yourself" and I don't need to be told twice. I just brought home a couple containers of cubed party cheeses and sliced salami, and I made little sandwiches on toast using the broiler of my oven, for maybe three days of lunch. Finally last night we hosted a book signing for drag king Murray Hill, and when we cleaned up the green room there was a whole box of pizza items left behind, since I knew I would be working the next night I saved it in the fridge for myself, and that was dinner tonight. Times are tough and I'm not making as money as I used to, so any night where I don't have to spend $10 or $12 on dinner and can eat for free, that's a big win. 

Ethan Hawke carries over again from "Sinister". I'm starting to think maybe he's been in a few horror movies over the years...

THE PLOT: In the year 2019, a plague has transformed almost every human into vampires. Faced with a dwindling blood supply, a researcher works with a covert band of vamps on a way to save humankind. 

AFTER: Well, this movie managed to make a bit of sense somewhere among all the nonsense. Obviously I waited too long to watch this movie, because it was made in 2009 and is set in the "future" world of 2019, that ship has kind of sailed now, the same sort of thing happened with "Strange Days" which was set at the turn of the millennium, but I watched it in 2024 or 2025. Whoopsie. But somebody in 2009 gazed forward ten years and imagined a world where the vampires not only existed, but they won, they spread their curse (or blessing) and flipped the script, this was a world with more vampires than humans. That's the nature of the thing, if each vampire makes another vampire every time they feed, and then THAT new vampire makes more vampires, and so on, and so on. It's like that old commercial where the woman liked her shampoo so much that she told two friends about it, and then THEY each told two friends, etc.

And because of human nature, nobody really saw the problem coming until it was much too late - or they saw the problem and nobody wanted to take steps to deal with it. This is the pattern for every natural resource we have - oil, gas, water, food - we keep using and using and we don't take steps to conserve or replace, it's "live for today" and maybe the next generation will be smarter and come up with a solution or some common sense. Nope, ain't gonna happen. So those vampires (having a human nature, essentially) just keep drinking more blood and more blood and denied the problem for so long that in the end there was no proper solution, things had gone way too far. 

They COULD have set up some kind of system, perhaps, maybe some enterprising vampires would have established "blood banks" much like the ones we already had, only for a different reason. They could have allowed enough humans to live, signed some kind of treaty where they could work something out, we'll let a few million humans live and we won't turn them into vampires, provided they make monthly blood donations to the blood/food banks. Nope, let's just keep hunting them until there's only a tiny minority left, because "we hungee". It tracks. Instead they created a bunch of "blood farms" where a few humans are kept alive (barely) and are regularly drained to supply blood for the elite vamps. This kind of turns this whole film into a weird version of "The Matrix", except humans are being kept alive in tanks for their blood, and not for their...umm, why were humans being kept alive in tanks in "The Matrix" again?

As a result there are now some vampires who can't find fresh blood, or can't afford it, and this has caused some vampires to feed off of each other, or themselves, leading to mutations where they lose their mental faculties and turn more savage and bat-like. I'm guessing this is some kind of metaphor overall, because we see a vampire early on that is dressed like a homeless man, a street person, one of society's unhoused, and he's taken into custody to protect the other people in the city. Some screenwriter has obviously spent some time in New York...

The other metaphor that feels like it's in play here, feels like it has something to do with ICE, the situation we have now where our government has sent armed agents out into the streets of American cities, seeking out illegal immigrants who are (allegedly) a drain on our system and the cause of all our problems, even though technically we still have a free society that claims to be open and accepting of all, we need to round up the "problem" people and send them out of our country at the very least. That's kind of what happens here as the vampires in charge seek out the "subsiders", those vampires that have gone crazy and savage because of the lack of blood. The armed government soldiers police the streets, round up the savage and mindless vamps and drag them out into the sunlight, behind a truck, as a means of execution. There's just no way that the screenwriters could have predicted the rise of ICE and the U.S. government taking non-citizens into custody and making them disappear in a similar fashion. 

There's no way that this film from 2009 could have predicted COVID, either, but it does feature a vampiric plague that was started by a vampire BAT infecting people in the year 2019. Did it come from a Wuham wet market? It's weird that this nonsensical horror film about the vampires winning managed to come SO CLOSE to predicting the pandemic, like if you just replace "vampirism" with "COVID virus" then it's spot on, right? Just me? 

But looking at the overall narrative here, it's just all over the place. In most movies vampires are bad, no question, but then here they're running society, so that's...um, good?  But they're farming blood from humans, so that's bad. And they've taken out most of the humans, also very bad BUT some vampires are working on a blood substitute, so, good? Just please tell me who I'm supposed to be rooting for here, the humans or the vampires, it's all very unclear.  

Then we've got a guy who claims he used to be a vampire, and he is no longer. Is that good or bad? We think now that vampires can be cured, so that's good? But then as soon as they bring news of the cure to the corporate executives, it's not needed because somebody did make a blood substitute that works. Crap, can we all just get on the same page here? We won't NEED the blood substitute if we have a cure, or we don't need the cure because we have the blood substitute, WHICH IS IT? Jesus fuck, there's so much back and forth here. 

The ending is just the worst, I couldn't even tell what happened and by that point I'd pretty much given up on caring about it. Edward and Cormac are vampires who have been cured, so are they human again, or something else? Frankie, Edward's brother, is a vampire soldier who then bites Cormac, the former vampire. But a cured human is somehow immune to vampire bites, and the cured human blood is somehow a cure in itself, so if a vampire drinks cured blood, he himself is then cured. So Frankie is now cured. 

BUT Frankie is soon consumed by other soldiers (wait, I thought you said cured humans were immune from vampire bites, but now they are NOT?) and then Frankie is dead, but those soldiers that ate him are no longer vampires. Great, but then the guy who invented the blood substitute kills them right away - I mean GOD DAMN, what is the point of curing people of vampirism if you're just going to kill them all two minutes later?  Same goes for Charles Bromley, the head of the company that provides the blood. He's tricked into biting Edward, who has been cured. So Charles then becomes cured, great, now that he's human again, maybe he'll see things differently. Nope, he's also immediately killed by vampire troops. I mean, I can see how this thing can spread to turn everybody human again but there has just GOT to be an easier way.

Even in an illogical vampire-run world, there needs to be just one series of logical narrative events leading to some kind of conclusion here. Sure, keep dreaming. 

Directed by Michael Spierig & Peter Spierig

Also starring Willem Dafoe (last seen in "The Legend of Ochi"), Sam Neill (last seen in "I'm Chevy Chase and You're Not"), Claudia Karvan, Michael Dorman (last seen in "Killer Elite"), Isabel Lucas (last seen in "Immortals"), Vince Colosimo (last seen in "Body of Lies"), Jay Lagai'aia, Harriet Minto-Day, Damien Garvey (last seen in "Love and Monsters"), Sahaj Dumpleton, Tiffany Lamb, Carl Rush (last seen in "The Proposition"), Paul Sonkkila (last seen in "Like Minds"), Todd Levi (last seen in "Blacklight"), Wayne Smith, Mungo McKay, Emma Randall, Charlotte Wilson, John Gibson (last seen in "MacGruber"), Robyn Moore, Troy MacKinder (last seen in "Scooby-Doo"), David Vallon (ditto), Christopher Kirby (last seen in "The Matrix Reloaded"), Michael Ienna (last seen in "In the Cut"), Alex Revan (last seen in "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps"), Renai Caruso, Jane Wallace, Rohan Smith, Bryan Probets (last seen in "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga"), Glen Martin, Jason Chin, Konrad Whitten, Mark Finden

RATING: 3 out of 10 crossbows (the weapon of choice in the future, apparently)

Sinister

Year 18, Day 279 - 10/6/26 - Movie #5,453

BEFORE: I've got to work on my November job schedules today, because next month is going to be here before you know it. The last two months of the Movie Year are traditionally a bit of a slower time, because I've usually used up most of my slots and I'm really just interested in finding a path to Christmas and working on the wrap-up post. This year should be no different, except I'll have 15 slots in each of the last two months instead of the usual 10 - so, essentially a movie every 2 days. Or a movie every day until I hit the holiday film, and then down time. Before that I've got to get through a couple Nets games, the WNBA playoffs, and a couple festivals like NewFest and DocFest. Those are real-world events, while my own personal movie blocks are more virtual - it's important that I prioritize things that are real over movie things, which are not, especially during October. Horror movies are not real, I can't stress that enough because if I lose sight of that I'll start having night terrors that are unrelated to work. 

Ethan Hawke carries over from "Black Phone 2". This was made by the same director, only a few years before the first "Black Phone" film. 

THE PLOT: A controversial true-crime writer finds a box of Super 8 home movies in his new home, revealing that the murder case he is researching could be the work of an unknown serial killer. 

AFTER: I haven't watched too many horror films in this "found footage" genre, which I think goes back to "Blair Witch", which was a big sensation back in the day. But that was a little different because somebody made that indie movie to LOOK like the whole thing was found footage that we were all watching, it was a trick of course but a good one. Most of the time the "found footage" is an element within a larger story, in other words, we're watching somebody who's watching the home movies or whatever, as seen here. Ethan Hawke plays a true-crime author who has bought or rented the home where a family was killed, and moved his own family there so he can research his next book. But he hasn't exactly told his wife that they'll all be living inside a crime scene, I'm sure she'll be fine with it and there won't be any repercussions of that whatsoever. What could POSSIBLY go wrong? 

This film was partially inspired by "The Ring", which wasn't really about found footage, but it was about deadly footage, that 2002 film had a cursed VHS tape that killed everyone who watched it, and you know, this was a common problem back in the old days before everybody switched over to DVDs. But I think if you watch "The Ring" on streaming you also die, don't say I didn't warn you. The crime author here finds a whole box of snuff films in his attic, but, umm, who left them there? It's easy enough to think that someone in the family who lived there had a thing for watching people die, but maybe it was whoever killed them? You'd think that the police would have been through every inch of that house, looking for clues, even the basement and the attic. 

The whole family was hung in the backyard, except for one young girl who disappeared and was never found. So, did someone kill the whole family just to kidnap the girl, or what? As Ellison checks out the other films in the crate, he sees a bunch of murders, all by different methods - a family burned up in a car, a family tied to chairs and drowned in a pool, and so on - but they're all filmed in the same style, which implies the same cameraman and/or the same killer. And then after watching them as video files, in slow-motion he notices an ominous face in the background in every film, watching the deaths take place. Creepy. So is this a cult or a deranged psycho? Bigger question, why not turn the videos over to the police or FBI so these crimes can be investigated by professionals? But no, he keeps the films to himself because he thinks he can get his next book out of them. 

A little research with the help of a local deputy (the sheriff is no help, and would very much like it if the author and his family would just pack up and move away) reveals that there are unsolved murders around the country that match what Ellison saw in those films - and in each case, there is a missing child from those families. The film kind of kicks into another gear when the author finds more stuff in the attic, namely child-like drawings of each murder seen on the Super 8 films, each cartoonishly shows the family members in the pool or in the burning car or hanging from the tree as "Mr. Boogie" watches. Then an expert on the occult gets back to Ellison with information about the symbol seen on the walls in some of the films, which is linked to the Babylonian god Bughuul, who lures children into his realm and consumes their souls. 

Sure, the creepy factor is very high here, but it's also just a little pat, like there just happens to be a noted Babylonian demon-god whose M.O. fits all these murder scenes so precisely. And Ellison burns the film projector and the snuff films with lighter fluid, but the next day there's a new crate of them in the attic, and a reel of "Extended Cut Endings"? Come on, no editor works that fast, and it takes like months to reprint films from negatives and half the time the lab screws it up and just gives you a free roll of film to make up for it, am I right?  Now we've got a DEMON arguing with the studio over final cut and demanding the release of his extended cut? Give me a break...

Directed by Scott Derrickson (director of "The Black Phone" and "Black Phone 2")

Also starring Juliet Rylance (last seen in "Love After Love"), Fred Dalton Thompson (last seen in "ReMastered: Tricky Dick and the Man in Black"), James Ransone (also carrying over from "Black Phone 2"), Michael Hall D'Addario (last seen in "People Like Us"), Clare Foley (last seen in "Southpaw"), Rob Riley, Tavis Smiley (last seen in "I Am M.L.K. Jr.), Janet Zappala, Victoria Leigh, Cameron Ocasio, Ethan Jack Haberfield (last seen in "We Have a Ghost"), Danielle Kotch, Blake Mizrahi, Nicholas King, Vincent D'Onofrio (last seen in "Caught Stealing"), Rachel Konstantin

RATING: 5 out of 10 talk show appearances