Category Archives: Movie review

Steel, Sorcery and Splattercraft: Deathstalker (2026)

29 Sunday Mar 2026

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In an era where digital spectacle often overwhelms texture and tactility, Deathstalker arrives like a relic unearthed from a more visceral cinematic past. Directed by Steven Kostanski, this Shudder-exclusive fantasy-horror hybrid leans unapologetically into the aesthetics of sword-and-sorcery pulp, resurrecting a subgenre that thrives on excess, grime, and the physicality of handcrafted effects.

Kostanski, whose reputation has steadily grown through cult favourites such as The Void and Psycho Goreman, has long been recognised as a modern custodian of practical effects artistry. With Deathstalker, he reasserts that position with confidence, delivering a film that feels less like a reinvention and more like a reclamation — a reminder that horror-fantasy can still breathe, bleed and rupture in tangible ways.

A Return to Practical Alchemy

The narrative itself is deliberately archetypal. When a battle-hardened warrior, played by Daniel Bernhardt, retrieves a cursed amulet from a battlefield littered with corpses, he becomes entangled in a web of dark magick, pursued by assassins and shadowed by an encroaching evil. It is a familiar framework — one that echoes the mythic simplicity of Conan-era storytelling — but Kostanski is less interested in narrative innovation than in experiential immersion.

Where Deathstalker distinguishes itself is in its commitment to the physical image. The creatures, transformations and grotesqueries that populate this world are rendered with a devotion to prosthetics, animatronics and practical ingenuity that feels increasingly rare. Flesh tears, bodies distort, and the supernatural manifests not as weightless pixels but as textured, often repulsive forms that occupy space with convincing presence.

There is a tactile pleasure in this approach — a sense that the horror exists within the frame rather than being layered atop it.

Kostanski’s Controlled Chaos

Kostanski’s direction walks a delicate line between reverence and reinvention. His work here feels informed by the splatter traditions of filmmakers like Stuart Gordon and Sam Raimi, yet it avoids slipping into mere pastiche. Instead, he channels those influences through a contemporary lens, maintaining a playful awareness of genre conventions without undermining their impact.

There is, crucially, a sense that Kostanski is enjoying himself.

That enjoyment becomes infectious. The film’s more excessive moments — of which there are many — are staged with a gleeful confidence that invites the audience to revel in the absurdity. Limbs are dispatched, creatures emerge from unlikely places, and the boundaries of taste are tested with a wink rather than a nudge.

Yet beneath the chaos lies a disciplined craftsman. Kostanski understands rhythm, allowing sequences of visceral intensity to breathe before plunging back into the grotesque. It is this balance that prevents the film from collapsing under the weight of its own indulgence.

Form Over Function

If Deathstalker falters, it does so in its narrative ambitions. The story, while serviceable, rarely transcends its archetypal foundations. Characterisation remains broad, motivations are often sketched rather than explored, and the emotional stakes never quite reach the same level of engagement as the film’s visual spectacle.

But this feels, to some extent, intentional.

Kostanski appears less concerned with crafting a deeply layered narrative than with constructing a world — one defined by its textures, its grotesqueries, and its commitment to physical effects. The result is a film that prioritises sensation over introspection, experience over exposition.

A Leader in His Field

In many ways, Deathstalker serves as a reaffirmation of Kostanski’s position within contemporary genre filmmaking. At a time when practical effects are often relegated to novelty status, he continues to push their boundaries, exploring what can be achieved through ingenuity, craftsmanship, and a willingness to embrace imperfection.

The film may not fully transcend its pulp origins, but it doesn’t need to. Its value lies in its execution — in the sheer commitment to a mode of filmmaking that refuses to disappear quietly.

The Prognosis:

Deathstalker is not a film that seeks to redefine fantasy horror. Instead, it embraces its lineage, revels in its excesses, and delivers a tactile, visceral experience that stands in stark contrast to the polished artificiality of much contemporary genre cinema.

A rough-edged but invigorating return to practical effects-driven storytelling, with Steven Kostanski once again proving himself a vital and playful force in modern horror.

  • Saul Muerte

Deathstalker will stream on Shudder from Fri 3rd April

Pedigree Meets Pulp: Cold Storage and the Limits of B-Movie Ambition

28 Saturday Mar 2026

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Movies and names.
It’s a subconscious thing with some, or sometimes, the only thing people do before considering a movie.
And that is, look at the names.
Specifically, the ones on the poster.
Actors (obvs) but “written by” and “directed by” are also big ones. And if you consider yourself a real cinephile, “produced by”.
Cold Storage has some impressive names attached to it. Also, “based on a novel” usually means there has been creative interpretation applied to the script, and most film makers usually LOVE flexing their game at such activity.
Throw in the fact that the writer is the man who wrote Carlito’s Way, the first Mission Impossible and a shit ton of Jurassic Park movies, and you have pedigree right there.
Plus, there is the cast. One made up of the cool guy from Stranger Things, the lead from (masterful) horror film Barbarian, Kevin Bacon’s daughter (the lead in the first Smile) and Liam frickin Neeson and Vanessa frickin Redgrave! Those are all decent hitters!
Plus-plus it is directed by… err someone with a lot of TV & doco credits, so we’ll see…

So, this film is a horror sci-fi set in a storage facility. And as locations go, that’s pretty cool. (Except I’ve yet to see a sci fi horror set in one be any good… 2012’s Storage 24 was one of the first and when you shoot an entire film in close up, it makes for a really shitty movie).
But I digress. Will this film be the exception?
It starts back in 1979 when Skylab fell to Earth, Western Australia (an event I actually remember, as I was both alive and on the same continent when it happened IRL). Once this happens, we soon find ourselves in Alien-bug-has-landed-on earth territory.
Fast jump to the exotic future of 2007 and said bug has been locked deep down inside a military storage facility all this time.
Except with time comes change and the facility has now become (on the surface at least) just a regular commercially-available-for-hire-by-the-general-public storage place.

And of course, 2007 is the year the deep cold vault containing the bug starts to fail…
So – what happens next – I’ll let Chris Dawes take you through.

This film hopes to answer two age old questions – Firstly, has the mold growing in my shower been conscious all along, and if so, have all the times I have smudged it with my arse driven it to vengeance?
And second! Is the reason we haven’t found aliens in Area 51 was that they hired Bazza to put up gyprock?
Cash job, of course.
The answer is yes to both, and thanks to top tier government fuckery uncolding the subterranean fridges, two down on their luck minimum-wagers are forced to do battle with a sentient sludge so profoundly roided up neither the Marines, the Hell’s Angels,
nor your butthead neighbour’s cat can knock it on its arse.
Damn your weakness, Ajax Spray and Wipe!
This film is pap. But it is pap made with a love of the genre and stars a cast of award winners who clearly enjoyed making a high budget B-Movie.
If you have two hours to switch your brain off and have a solid good time, you can do far worse than spending twenty bucks on this. Back to Ant.

So, as you can see, this is a fun popcorn romp, with some very strong ingredients.
But is it Tremors level B-grade horror/comedy par excellence?
For mine, not really. It has some very fine moments held up by an outstanding afore-mentioned cast, but its pacing is at times uneven. And certain story elements feel rushed or glossed over.
And for that I can only think to blame a director who is still finding his movie legs, as this is just his second feature. Although he has a lot of excellent TV credits, so maybe studio interference stuffed him around?
Who knows?

The Prognosis:

Worth a look, but lower the expectations the better. A good facility for some silly fun.
See what I did there?

  • Antony Yee & Chris Dawes

The Slow Rot of Truth: We Bury the Dead (2024)

11 Wednesday Mar 2026

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Zombie cinema has rarely been short of metaphors. From consumerism to social collapse, the living dead have long functioned as mirrors reflecting humanity’s anxieties back at itself. In We Bury the Dead, Australian filmmaker Zak Hilditch approaches the genre from a quieter, more introspective angle, delivering a film that is less concerned with apocalyptic spectacle and more invested in the emotional wreckage left behind when the world stops making sense.

Following the critical success of his Stephen King adaptation 1922, Hilditch once again demonstrates a fascination with grief, guilt and moral ambiguity. Where many zombie films focus on the chaos of the outbreak itself, We Bury the Dead situates its narrative in the uneasy aftermath — a world where the catastrophe has already occurred and society is struggling to process what comes next.

The premise is deceptively straightforward. After a military experiment goes catastrophically wrong, large portions of the population are left dead… or something close to it. The government attempts to contain the situation by declaring the reanimated victims harmless and slow-moving, encouraging volunteers to enter quarantined zones to recover bodies and offer closure to grieving families. It is an oddly bureaucratic approach to the apocalypse — one that immediately hints at deeper layers of deception.

Enter Ava, portrayed with steely determination by Daisy Ridley. Driven by the possibility that her missing husband might still be found within the restricted zone, Ava volunteers to join the clean-up effort. What begins as a mission rooted in grief soon transforms into a descent into a landscape where the official narrative begins to unravel.

Because the dead, it seems, are not as harmless as the military would like the public to believe.

Grief at the End of the World

At its heart, We Bury the Dead is not really about zombies. Instead, it is about the human inability to accept loss.

Hilditch structures the film almost like a road movie through the ruins of a broken society. Ava’s journey through quarantined territories becomes a physical manifestation of grief itself — a search for answers that may never come, fuelled by the stubborn hope that closure might still be possible.

The film repeatedly asks a troubling question: if the dead returned, even briefly, would we really want to let them go again?

This thematic focus places the film closer to reflective entries in the genre such as The Girl with All the Gifts or 28 Days Later, where the apocalypse becomes a canvas for exploring the emotional cost of survival rather than simply a playground for gore.

A Different Kind of Undead

The film’s interpretation of the undead also deserves mention. Rather than the traditional shambling hordes popularised by George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Hilditch presents a more ambiguous threat.

Initially passive, the reanimated bodies appear almost dormant — eerily calm, as if waiting. But as Ava moves deeper into the quarantine zone, something begins to shift. The dead become restless, unpredictable, increasingly aggressive.

The slow escalation works effectively because Hilditch refuses to rush it. The horror creeps in gradually, allowing the tension to build organically rather than relying on sudden bursts of violence.

This patient pacing will not satisfy viewers looking for relentless zombie carnage, but it serves the film’s more contemplative ambitions well.

Atmosphere Over Spectacle

Visually, We Bury the Dead leans heavily into desolation. The quarantined landscapes feel eerily still, drained of life and colour. Roads stretch endlessly through abandoned territories while small settlements sit frozen in time, as though the world simply stopped functioning mid-sentence.

The result is an atmosphere that feels closer to post-apocalyptic melancholy than traditional horror.

Hilditch has always shown a strong sense of visual restraint, and that restraint works largely in the film’s favour. The horror rarely comes from the monsters themselves but from the creeping realisation that the official narrative surrounding the disaster may be deliberately misleading.

In other words, the true threat may not be the dead — but the living who are trying to control the story.

A Thoughtful Entry in a Crowded Genre

While We Bury the Dead occasionally struggles with pacing — its deliberate tempo can at times feel slightly overextended — the film’s emotional depth helps it rise above many of its genre contemporaries.

Ridley anchors the story with a performance grounded in determination and vulnerability, carrying the film through its quieter moments of reflection and uncertainty. Her journey is less about survival than about acceptance — the painful process of realising that some answers simply cannot bring comfort.

In a genre often dominated by chaos and carnage, We Bury the Dead chooses a more sombre path.

It’s a zombie film about mourning.

And in that quiet, reflective approach, Zak Hilditch finds something unexpectedly powerful.

The Prognosis:

A thoughtful, grief-stricken take on the undead mythos that favours atmosphere and emotional weight over relentless action.

  • Saul Muerte

Watching the Watchers: Bodycam (2026)

11 Wednesday Mar 2026

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The found-footage format has long been one of horror’s most effective narrative devices. When done well, it places audiences directly inside the unfolding terror, collapsing the distance between viewer and victim. Yet it’s also a subgenre littered with misfires, where shaky cameras and contrived setups often undermine the illusion of authenticity. Bodycam, the latest Shudder Original from Canadian filmmaker Brandon Christensen, sits somewhere between those two extremes — a competent genre exercise that understands the mechanics of found-footage horror, even if it doesn’t entirely reinvent them.

Christensen has quietly carved out a niche within contemporary supernatural horror. His earlier films, particularly Still/Born and Superhost, demonstrated a knack for building tension through confined spaces and psychological unease. With Bodycam, he expands that approach into a story rooted in modern surveillance culture, using the now-familiar lens of police body cameras to frame a tale where guilt, paranoia, and something far more sinister begin to blur together.

The premise is deceptively simple. Two police officers respond to what initially appears to be a routine domestic disturbance call. When the situation spirals into a tragic accident, the pair make a desperate decision to conceal the truth, fearing the consequences of public scrutiny and institutional fallout. Yet as they attempt to rewrite the narrative, they begin to realise that the technology designed to document the truth may not be the only witness present.

And perhaps something else is recording.

Christensen leans heavily into the aesthetics of surveillance — dashboard cameras, bodycam footage, and fragments of security recordings stitched together to tell the story. This multi-camera structure echoes the fragmented style seen in genre landmarks like The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity, and REC, all of which demonstrated how technological mediation can heighten a sense of realism. The trick, however, lies in convincing audiences that every camera angle exists for a plausible reason — one of the classic “dos and don’ts” of found-footage filmmaking.

To Christensen’s credit, Bodycam largely understands those rules. The body camera format itself naturally justifies the constant presence of a recording device, avoiding the common genre pitfall where characters inexplicably continue filming while their lives are clearly in danger. The immediacy of the footage lends several scenes a raw intensity, particularly when the supernatural elements begin to bleed into the frame in subtle, fleeting glimpses.

Where the film falters slightly is in its reliance on familiar beats. The escalating paranoia, the creeping suggestion that unseen forces are manipulating events, and the eventual collision between guilt and supernatural consequence follow a trajectory that seasoned horror audiences will likely recognise. Christensen proves adept at staging tension, but the narrative rarely deviates far from the established playbook.

Still, the film’s thematic core gives it an added layer of intrigue. By centring the story on police officers attempting to hide a mistake, Bodycam taps into contemporary anxieties surrounding accountability, surveillance, and the uncomfortable reality that technology can both reveal and obscure the truth. The idea that the cameras designed to protect authority figures might ultimately condemn them adds an unsettling moral dimension to the proceedings.

Visually, the film embraces the claustrophobic aesthetic that Christensen has proven comfortable with throughout his career. Much like Superhost, the tension builds through confined environments and a slow tightening of psychological pressure. Darkness becomes a character in its own right, with the limited field of vision offered by the body cameras forcing viewers to search every corner of the frame for signs of what might be lurking just outside the light.

As with many entries in the found-footage canon, the film’s success ultimately depends on how much patience audiences have for the format’s limitations. Shaky visuals, fragmented storytelling, and a reliance on atmosphere over spectacle are all part of the package.

For fans of the subgenre, Bodycam offers a solid if familiar addition to the catalogue — a tense supernatural thriller that understands the rules of the game without necessarily rewriting them.

The Prognosis:

A competent found-footage chiller that proves Brandon Christensen knows how to work within the genre’s framework, even if he occasionally plays it a little too safe.

  • Saul Muerte

Bodycam streams on Shudder from Fri 13 Mar

The Cruel Game of Belonging: The Plague (2025)

10 Tuesday Mar 2026

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Few environments can be as quietly brutal as a group of adolescent boys left to navigate the fragile space between childhood and adulthood. The Plague, the feature debut from writer-director Charlie Polinger, taps into that unsettling social ecosystem with an unnerving sense of authenticity, crafting a coming-of-age drama that plays like a slow-burn psychological horror.

Set against the competitive backdrop of a boys’ water polo camp in the summer of 2003, the film follows twelve-year-old Ben as he attempts to integrate into the camp’s unforgiving social order. Everett Blunck captures the unease of a boy desperate for acceptance, only to find himself pulled into the group’s cruel fixation on Eli — an isolated camper whom the others brand as contagious, referring to him with chilling simplicity as “The Plague.”

What begins as childish teasing slowly reveals itself to be something far more disturbing.

A Study in Toxic Masculinity

Polinger’s film isn’t interested in conventional horror tropes. Instead, the true terror lies in the social dynamics of the boys themselves. Within this tightly wound, male-dominated environment, power is established through humiliation, conformity and cruelty.

The film scrutinises the early formation of toxic masculinity with uncomfortable precision. Strength is equated with dominance. Vulnerability becomes a weakness to be mocked or punished. And the desire to belong — particularly at such a fragile age — becomes a powerful motivator for moral compromise.

Ben’s gradual complicity in the torment of Eli becomes the film’s central tragedy. The cruelty isn’t born from malice so much as fear: fear of exclusion, fear of being the next target, fear of standing apart from the pack.

It’s an unsettling reminder that the pressures of social acceptance can be just as dangerous as outright hostility.

The Horror of Adolescence

Polinger frames the story almost like a psychological fable about adolescence. The rumour of “The Plague” itself operates less as a literal illness and more as a metaphor — a childish myth that allows the boys to rationalise their behaviour while maintaining the illusion of innocence.

The film’s atmosphere subtly leans into genre territory. Long stretches of uneasy silence, tense glances between characters and the oppressive heat of the summer camp create a creeping sense of dread. At times it feels closer to social horror than traditional drama, echoing the uncomfortable emotional territory explored in films like Carrie and Raw.

The difference here is that the monsters are not supernatural — they’re simply boys learning the wrong lessons about what it means to become men.

A Strong Ensemble of Young Performers

Much of the film’s effectiveness comes from its young cast, who bring a naturalistic authenticity to the story. Everett Blunck anchors the film with a quietly affecting performance as Ben, capturing the anxiety and moral confusion of a boy desperate to fit in.

Opposite him, Kenny Rasmussen’s Eli becomes the film’s emotional centre — a painfully believable portrait of the outsider whose difference makes him an easy target.

Meanwhile Joel Edgerton, appearing as the camp authority figure “Daddy Wags,” adds an intriguing layer to the dynamic, embodying the distant adult presence that looms over the boys’ social ecosystem without ever fully understanding it.

A Telling and Timely Reflection

At its core, The Plague is less about childhood cruelty and more about the systems that quietly nurture it. The film exposes the unspoken rules that shape male identity from a young age — rules that reward aggression, punish empathy and demand conformity at all costs.

It’s a telling and topical story, particularly in an era increasingly willing to interrogate the cultural roots of toxic masculinity.

While the film occasionally lingers too long in its quieter moments, its thematic weight and strong performances ultimately make it a compelling and thought-provoking watch.

The Prognosis:

An uncomfortable yet insightful exploration of peer pressure, masculinity, and the terrifying cost of wanting to belong.

  • Saul Muerte

The Plague will be screening in Australian cinemas from Mar 12.

Spirals Into the Screen: OBEX and the Dream Logic of Digital Worlds

07 Saturday Mar 2026

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In an era where video game movies usually chase blockbuster spectacle, OBEX heads defiantly in the opposite direction. Written, directed by, and starring Albert Birney, the film is a surreal, low-fi fantasy that feels less like a conventional adventure and more like a fever dream about loneliness, digital escapism, and the strange places our minds wander when reality becomes unbearable.

Fans of Birney’s earlier cult oddity Strawberry Mansion will recognize the sensibility immediately: handmade visuals, melancholy humour, and a fascination with the porous boundary between imagination and waking life.

A Quest That Begins With Loss

Birney plays Conor, a thirty-something recluse whose existence is almost entirely mediated through a computer screen. His two anchors are video games and his beloved dog Sandy. When Sandy mysteriously disappears, the loss shatters the fragile routine that defines Conor’s life. His search leads him somewhere unexpected — into the very game he has been obsessively playing.

The titular game, OBEX, becomes both portal and psychological mirror. To rescue Sandy, Conor must traverse its strange landscapes and confront a demon named Ixaroth, but the journey is less about heroic triumph than existential unraveling.

Like many of the film’s most effective moments, the premise works metaphorically: the game world is not merely a fantasy environment but a projection of Conor’s inner life.

Early Lynchian Echoes

There’s an unmistakably David Lynch-adjacent energy to the film’s tone — particularly the director’s early work, where narrative coherence often gives way to texture and mood. OBEX embraces dream logic. Scenes drift in and out of one another. Dialogue occasionally feels like fragments of a half-remembered conversation. Objects carry an eerie symbolic weight.

The aesthetic reinforces this atmosphere. Birney favours tactile, lo-fi visual effects and handmade set pieces that feel closer to experimental art installation than mainstream fantasy cinema. The game environments have the uncanny texture of forgotten 1990s PC graphics filtered through a surrealist lens.

Rather than striving for realism, OBEX leans into artificiality — and in doing so creates something oddly hypnotic.

Gamification as Psychological Descent

Where OBEX becomes particularly interesting is in its use of gaming mechanics as narrative structure. Levels, quests, and encounters mirror Conor’s emotional state. Progression through the game doesn’t feel triumphant; it feels obsessive, as if he’s spiraling deeper into a digital labyrinth.

This gamified framework also becomes commentary on escapism. Conor retreats into OBEX not just to save Sandy but to avoid confronting the emptiness of his real life. The deeper he goes, the less clear the boundaries between player and character become.

The film never fully explains the metaphysics of its world — wisely so. OBEX functions best when experienced as a symbolic landscape rather than a literal one.

Sound, Texture and Handmade Weirdness

Adding to the film’s dreamlike texture is its score, recorded by Josh Dibb, founding member of Animal Collective. The music drifts between ambient melancholy and eerie electronic pulses, giving the film a sonic identity that feels both nostalgic and otherworldly.

Combined with Birney’s deliberately rough visual style, the soundtrack enhances the sensation that OBEX exists somewhere between retro gaming nostalgia and avant-garde fantasy.

A Strange but Compelling Indie Journey

OBEX won’t be for everyone. Its narrative can feel deliberately opaque, and viewers expecting a traditional fantasy adventure may find themselves disoriented by its meandering dream logic. Yet that same refusal to conform is also its greatest strength.

Birney has crafted something personal, odd, and unmistakably independent — a film that feels like it emerged from the margins of cinema rather than its mainstream centre.

OBEX stands as an intriguing curiosity: a surreal digital odyssey that captures the strange emotional gravity of games, memory, and loneliness.

And like any good quest, it leaves you wondering whether the real journey happened inside the screen — or inside the player.

  • Saul Muerte

Words That Wound: Crazy Old Lady and Argentina’s New Wave of Psychological Horror

26 Thursday Feb 2026

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Premiering exclusively on Shudder and AMC+ on 27 February, Crazy Old Lady arrives at a moment when Argentine horror is no longer a niche curiosity but a steadily rising force within global genre cinema. Directed by Martín Mauregui, the film won Best Director in the Horror Competition at Fantastic Fest and screened at the Sitges Film Festival, signaling its pedigree within the festival circuit.

Argentina’s Expanding Horror Identity

Over the past decade, Argentine horror has carved out a distinct tonal space — one steeped in psychological dread, moral decay, and socio-political unease. Films like Terrified (Aterrados) and When Evil Lurks, both from Demián Rugna, have demonstrated a willingness to confront spiritual rot with startling brutality. Meanwhile, works such as The Last Matinee have blended nostalgia with escalating carnage.

Crazy Old Lady situates itself within this movement but opts for a more intimate chamber-piece approach. Gone are demonic outbreaks or grand supernatural set-pieces. Instead, the horror is confined to a single home — and to a single voice.

The House as a Psychological Trap

The premise is elegantly simple: on a storm-lashed evening, Pedro answers a desperate plea from his ex-girlfriend to watch over her senile mother, Alicia. What begins as reluctant caretaking morphs into entrapment when Alicia refuses to let him leave. From here, Mauregui crafts a claustrophobic duel between youth and decay, autonomy and obligation.

The house becomes less a haunted space than a psychological maze. Doors lock. Power flickers. Corridors stretch under dim lighting. Yet the most unnerving element is Alicia herself.

Generational Trauma as Curse

At its core, Crazy Old Lady explores generational trauma — the emotional inheritance passed down like an heirloom no one wants. Alicia’s ramblings oscillate between fragility and cruelty, revealing buried resentments and manipulative patterns that echo through her daughter and now ensnare Pedro.

The horror lies not only in her sadistic “games,” but in the suggestion that her worldview — her bitterness, her warped moral logic — has already seeped into the next generation. Words linger long after they’re spoken. They calcify. They shape behavior.

Mauregui repeatedly frames Alicia in tight close-ups as she mutters aphorisms that feel both cryptic and venomous. These fragments of speech function almost like incantations, embedding themselves in the atmosphere. In this sense, the film’s haunting is linguistic rather than spectral.

It’s a compelling thematic hook, even if the script occasionally circles its ideas without deepening them.

Mauregui’s Controlled Minimalism

Martín Mauregui directs with restraint, favoring sustained tension over sudden shocks. The pacing is deliberate, sometimes to a fault, but his control of confined space is impressive. The storm outside acts as sonic punctuation, underscoring Pedro’s isolation.

Where the film falters slightly is in escalation. The psychological cat-and-mouse dynamic promises a crescendo of either shocking revelation or cathartic confrontation. Instead, the climax feels muted — more simmer than explosion. For some viewers, this restraint will read as sophistication; for others, as hesitation.

Still, Mauregui’s festival recognition feels justified. There’s a clear authorial voice at work — one attuned to emotional cruelty rather than spectacle.

A Solid Entry in a Strong Movement

Crazy Old Lady may not reach the ferocity of When Evil Lurks or the nerve-shredding intensity of Terrified, but it contributes to the ongoing evolution of Argentine horror by narrowing its focus to the domestic sphere. It suggests that sometimes the most enduring hauntings are not demons or ghosts, but the toxic narratives families pass down through generations.

Not a breakout masterpiece, but another confident step in Argentina’s increasingly compelling horror renaissance.

  • Saul Muerte

Blood in the Water: Killer Whale Goes for the Throat

17 Tuesday Feb 2026

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There’s an compelling idea lurking beneath Killer Whale: a trauma drama dressed up as a creature feature. Director Jo-Anne Brechin frames her survival thriller around grief, survivor’s guilt and damaged ambition, using the rampaging orca less as a monster and more as an externalisation of unresolved pain. It’s a thoughtful angle in theory — but one that struggles to stay afloat amid the film’s more formulaic genre trappings.

The story follows Maddie (Virginia Gardner), a gifted cellist whose life stalls after a violent robbery leaves her hearing impaired and her boyfriend dead. A year later, a guilt-ridden holiday to Thailand with her friend Trish (Mel Jarnson) spirals into nightmare territory when an abused captive orca is unleashed into a secluded lagoon. What begins as an emotional reckoning quickly pivots into familiar killer-creature beats: stranded swimmers, tightening geography, and a predator circling with mechanical persistence.

Brechin deserves credit for attempting to graft psychological weight onto a well-worn subgenre. The early passages, which explore Maddie’s fractured identity and her complicated relationship with sound and silence, hint at a more introspective film. Gardner carries these quieter moments with conviction, grounding the character’s grief in a way that feels authentic. Yet once the survival mechanics kick in, the emotional throughline becomes increasingly submerged beneath routine suspense staging.

Compared to the great killer-creature touchstones — from the elegant dread of Jaws to the lean efficiency of modern aquatic thrillers — Killer Whale feels caught between ambitions. The orca itself is an effective symbol of exploitation and rage, but the visual execution varies wildly, with tension undercut by uneven effects and repetitive attack rhythms. The lagoon setting promises claustrophobia but rarely capitalises on its full spatial potential, resulting in sequences that feel more cyclical than escalating.

What works best is the film’s thematic intent: the suggestion that trauma, like a wounded animal, will keep circling until confronted. What doesn’t is the script’s tendency to spell out these ideas while relying on stock genre decisions that blunt their impact. Characters make frustrating choices less out of psychological necessity than narrative convenience, and the pacing sags in a middle stretch that should be tightening the screws.

The Prognosis:

Killer Whale never entirely bores, and its central metaphor gives it a faint pulse beyond standard creature-feature thrills. But the disconnect between its emotional aspirations and its execution leaves it feeling like a sketch of a stronger film — one where trauma and terror might have truly reinforced each other, rather than competing for the spotlight.

  • Saul Muerte

Killer Whale will be available to rent on digital platforms from Feb 20.

Engineered Hearts: Honey Bunch and the Science of Perfect Love

13 Friday Feb 2026

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A love story refracted through broken memory and clinical obsession, Honey Bunch is a coolly unsettling chamber piece that folds romance into speculative body horror. Directed by Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer, the film explores the fragile architecture of intimacy with a precision that feels both surgical and deeply human.

Diana awakens in transit, ferried by her husband toward a remote experimental trauma facility buried in the wilderness. The reason for the journey has slipped from her grasp, and that absence becomes the film’s central engine. Memory in Honey Bunch is treated not as a passive repository but as contested territory — something that can be edited, erased, and repurposed in the pursuit of an idealised union. As fragments return, so too do the sinister implications of her marriage, and the film gradually reveals a macabre scientific underworld obsessed with engineering perfect compatibility.

The performances anchor the film’s speculative conceits in bruising emotional reality. Grace Glowicki gives a finely calibrated turn as Diana, charting her character’s oscillation between vulnerability and dawning suspicion with minute physical detail. Opposite her, Ben Petrie plays the husband with a carefully modulated ambiguity, his tenderness always shadowed by something clinical and withholding. The supporting presence of Jason Isaacs and Kate Dickie deepens the film’s atmosphere of institutional unease; both lend gravitas to a world where love has been subjected to experimental scrutiny.

Visually, the film is austere and tactile. The wilderness setting feels less like an escape than a sealed laboratory, its natural beauty contrasting sharply with the antiseptic interiors of the facility. Mancinelli and Sims-Fewer construct a series of twists that spiral into a macabre meditation on the pursuit of soulmates — a quest that tests the ethical boundaries of devotion. Their direction favours mood over spectacle, allowing dread to accumulate in quiet spaces and loaded silences.

What elevates Honey Bunch is its insistence on imperfection. Beneath its science-fiction trappings lies a probing question: if love is predicated on accepting another’s flaws, what happens when technology promises to sand those flaws away? The film’s answer is neither simple nor comforting. Instead, it presents a haunting vision of romance strained through the machinery of control, where the desire for unity risks erasing the very qualities that make connection meaningful.

The Prognosis:

Honey Bunch stands as a striking synthesis of performance and idea — a cerebral, emotionally resonant work that twists the language of genre into a meditation on memory, identity, and the dangerous allure of engineered love.

  • Saul Muerte

Honey Bunch streams on Shudder from Jan 13.

Lord of Misrule (2025) and the Beautiful Trap of Folk Horror

01 Sunday Feb 2026

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Harvest festivals have often provided a sense of eternal dread in horror cinema. They promise abundance, fertility, renewal — and yet so often conceal rot beneath the ribbons. Lord of Misrule arrives knowingly into that lineage, stepping barefoot into the blood-soaked soil cultivated by The Wicker Man, The Witch, Midsommar, and their increasingly crowded offspring. It is a film deeply aware of the terrain it treads, and for much of its runtime, that awareness works in its favour.

Set within a secluded village bound by tradition and silence, the film opens with a familiar yet potent inciting wound: the disappearance of the daughter of the town’s new priest during the annual harvest festival. From that absence, Lord of Misrule builds a creeping architecture of dread — one not reliant on jump scares or grotesquerie, but on the slow realisation that this town does not merely remember its past… it still feeds it.

Folk Horror with its Roots Intact

What distinguishes Lord of Misrule from lesser folk horror pastiches is its patience. The film allows itself to breathe within the rhythms of rural life — the rituals, the half-smiles, the whispered warnings that feel less like exposition than confession. There is a welcome refusal to rush headlong into spectacle; instead, dread accumulates in glances, silences, and the heavy implication that something ancient still demands tribute.

The concept itself is elegantly simple: a malevolent spirit bound to the land, sustained through sacrifice, disguised beneath centuries of polite ceremony. It is horror not as invasion, but as inheritance — evil not arriving from without, but preserved lovingly from within. This thematic alignment with generational guilt and communal complicity places Lord of Misrule firmly within folk horror’s most enduring philosophical concerns.

Anchored by Flesh and Bone

Central to the film’s effectiveness are its performances, which elevate the material beyond mere genre exercise.

Tuppence Middleton delivers a measured, emotionally grounded performance that anchors the film’s more ethereal elements. She brings a quiet steel to her role — grief without hysteria, resolve without bombast — allowing the horror to orbit her rather than overwhelm her. She becomes the audience’s surrogate not through fear, but through endurance.

Ralph Ineson, meanwhile, is perfectly cast. His voice alone seems carved from oak and grave soil, and he carries the weight of rural menace with effortless authority. Ineson understands folk horror instinctively: his presence suggests not villainy, but inevitability — as though the land itself has learned how to speak through him.

Together, Middleton and Ineson provide the film with its most compelling dynamic: modern skepticism locked in slow collision with ritualistic fatalism.

When the Earth Cracks

Yet for all its atmospheric command, Lord of Misrule ultimately stumbles where folk horror so often does — in its final act.

After spending so long carefully cultivating ambiguity, dread, and moral tension, the film opts for a more conventional and hurried resolution. The climax, rather than deepening the film’s thematic unease, simplifies it. What was once uncanny becomes explicit; what was once philosophical becomes procedural. The film trades unease for explanation, dread for closure — and in doing so, loses some of the strange power it so patiently summoned.

This is not a disastrous collapse, but it is a deflating one. The third act feels less like a natural culmination than a narrative obligation — as though the film, having wandered confidently into ancient woods, suddenly remembered it had to find its way back out.

A Worthy Addition to the Circle

Still, to dwell solely on its shortcomings would be to ignore what Lord of Misrule accomplishes with confidence and restraint. In an era where folk horror has become increasingly stylised and self-conscious, the film remains refreshingly earnest. It is not ironic. It is not detached. It believes in its mythology — and that belief carries it far, even when its footing falters.

Lord of Misrule stands as a strong, if imperfect, addition to contemporary folk horror. It may not redefine the genre, but it respects it deeply — and in a landscape crowded with hollow ritual and empty symbolism, that alone makes it worth entering the circle.

  • Saul Muerte

LORD OF MISRULE will be available to Rent or buy on Digital at: Apple TV, Prime Video, Google TV, YouTube, Fetch (AU), Foxtel Store (AU), SKY Store (NZ), and Neon (NZ). Own it on DVD at JB Hi-Fi and Sanity from FEBRUARY 4TH!