Jim Vorel

This is a daring, unsettling, inscrutable and at times deeply boring venture into the farthest boundaries of horror esotericism, utterly unlike anything that most viewers will have ever seen before.

The feeling is one of depletion, as V/H/S/99 begins robbing past hits in a grim effort to keep itself mobile and vital.

In truth, the entirety of Halloween Ends is suffused in some kind of magic or witchcraft, a gauzy layer of unreality that prevents a single character in the film from behaving like an actual human being.

Any time Goodnight Mommy tiptoes toward the brink, there’s a hand waiting to yank it back toward mundanity.

Like Green’s first 2018 Halloween reboot, this is a badly overstuffed film that largely ignores the inherent strength of what should be its central story—three generations of Strode women, facing down The Boogeyman—in favor of random, gratuitous action scenes and endless subplots.

Put simply, V/H/S/94 is almost less an anthology than it is a vehicle for a single, deliriously creative segment from director Timo Tjahjanto, which dominates the entire center of the film. All the other segments simply orbit this central anchor, caught in the inexorable pull of Tjahjanto’s demented imagination, which manages to give V/H/S/94 at least 30 minutes in which one cannot look away.

Unfortunately, There’s Someone Inside Your House is a considerably more rote endeavor in mass-market horror filmmaking—competently shot and staged, but decidedly familiar, it displays none of the emotional nuance or attention to character detail we’ve associated with Brice in the past.

The Witch this is not, but that’s ultimately fine—although the themes may be something like a mash-up of The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible, the tone has a much more pop mentality that is at least consistent throughout.

In the moment, what it does do well is tease the increasingly metaphysical conclusion that is swiftly approaching, which looks to shed some of the “slasher movie” trappings and embrace the idea of a supernatural evil that resonates and repeats across centuries and generations of lives. Here’s hoping that the Fear Street trilogy can stick the landing.

The tone has more of the edgy, joyfully nihilistic streak present in something like Heathers. Tack on some legitimately brutal deaths, and you have a very effective modern black comedy/horror hybrid in the making, enhanced by an evocative score, crisp cinematography, lively camera and appropriately grungy soundtrack of early ‘90s classics.

There’s little here for the casual horror fan, but genre completionists will likely find something that sticks with them.

Snyder is trying to do so much here that the whole thing practically collapses under its own weight, a victim of its own attempt at bombast and visual iconoclasm.

Judged purely on the promises made by the title, it’s hard to see Godzilla vs. Kong as anything but a success. As a film, on the other hand, Wingard’s G v. K often still feels like it’s held together with copious amounts of cinematic duct tape.

Director Yeon Sang-ho, who staged genuinely tense sequences in the first film, just seems suddenly out of his element here when expected to produce a grander action spectacle.

Villains is a workmanlike thriller with a pair of memorable performances and a simplistic premise.

David Gordon Green’s Halloween is an intensely frustrating experience, buoyed by solid action and well-crafted scares, but simultaneously damned by an incredibly clunky script and appalling lack of focus.

It’s just passable popcorn entertainment for a Friday night on the couch, and not on the same level as more inspired Netflix genre movies from the likes of Mike Flanagan, such as Hush or Gerald’s Game.

The criticism is less that Mute doesn’t know what it wants to be, and more that it seems to emphatically decide what it wants to be every few minutes, only to then change its mind once more. And every time it does so, it’s the audience that is being left behind.

It’s easy to see why studio execs at Paramount were unsure of how to market this movie, as it seemingly attempts to check so many boxes at once that nearly any description is going to fail to accurately convey the experience of watching it. Ultimately, it’s that unstable, unpredictable nature that is simultaneously its most entertaining and most problematic aspect.

As for the cinematic The Disaster Artist, outside of its magnificent central portrayal by the elder Franco, its strongest and occasionally most problematic elements revolve around the huge ensemble cast of familiar faces.

Theatre of Blood is a classic revenge story in the Grand Guignol tradition, following a single mastermind as he hunts down and messily dispatches all who have wronged him in ironic fashion.