Category Archives: Movie review

Buried Deep: Hokum (2026)

08 Friday May 2026

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With Hokum, writer-director Damian McCarthy continues his ascent as one of contemporary horror’s most distinctive voices — a storyteller deeply attuned to atmosphere, folklore, and the psychological wounds that fester beneath grief.

Following the unnerving precision of his earlier work, McCarthy delivers perhaps his most accessible feature to date, but crucially, accessibility does not come at the expense of identity. Hokum still bears all the hallmarks of his cinema: oppressive mood, fractured psyches, dark humour, and mythology that feels less invented than unearthed.

This is horror that creeps rather than lunges.
A ghost story told through rot, memory, and rebirth.

The Inn as Psychological Mausoleum

The premise is deceptively intimate. Novelist Ohm Bauman retreats to a remote inn to scatter his parents’ ashes, only to become entangled in whispers surrounding a witch tied to the building’s infamous honeymoon suite.

But McCarthy understands that isolated settings are never merely locations. They are psychological extensions of the characters trapped within them.

The inn in Hokum becomes a liminal space suspended between mourning and transformation — a decaying threshold where unresolved trauma manifests through folklore and hallucination alike. Every creaking corridor and dimly lit room feels infected by memory.

The one-location approach works beautifully here, amplifying the claustrophobia while forcing the audience into the same suffocating emotional space as Ohm himself.

Folklore as Emotional Architecture

What separates McCarthy’s work from more conventional supernatural horror is the way he embeds folklore into the emotional core of his narratives.

The mythology in Hokum never feels expositional or over-explained. Instead, it exists like oral tradition — fragmented stories passed down, distorted through fear and repetition. The witch haunting the inn becomes less a singular entity and more a manifestation of communal grief and inherited guilt.

McCarthy understands an essential truth about folklore:
its power lies not in certainty, but in ambiguity.

The horror emerges from what cannot be fully understood.

Grief, Decay, and Rebirth

Beneath its supernatural framework, Hokum is fundamentally a film about grief — specifically the way grief reshapes identity.

Ohm’s journey is not simply about uncovering the inn’s secrets, but confronting the emotional debris left behind by loss. McCarthy explores mourning as something cyclical and transformative, where death inevitably gives rise to reinvention, however painful.

This theme of rebirth surfaces repeatedly through the film’s recurring rabbit iconography — creatures traditionally associated with fertility, resurrection, and transition between worlds. Here, the rabbit imagery becomes deeply uncanny, suggesting both vulnerability and metamorphosis.

It is one of the film’s most effective symbolic threads, quietly reinforcing the idea that trauma changes us into something new… whether we wish it to or not.

Humour in the Darkness

What makes Hokum particularly compelling is its willingness to puncture its own dread with moments of dry, almost uncomfortable black humour.

McCarthy has become increasingly adept at balancing tonal shifts without collapsing the atmosphere entirely. The humour here does not undercut the horror; it humanises it. It reminds us that absurdity often accompanies grief, that fear and laughter are not opposites but uneasy companions.

This tonal elasticity gives the film texture, preventing it from disappearing entirely into self-seriousness.

Damian McCarthy’s Rising Voice

With Hokum, McCarthy further establishes himself as part of a modern wave of horror filmmakers reclaiming atmosphere and folklore as vehicles for deeply personal storytelling.

There are traces of classic ghost stories here, certainly, but also something distinctly contemporary in the film’s focus on emotional inheritance and psychological fragmentation.

More importantly, McCarthy continues to trust the audience — resisting over-explanation in favour of mood, suggestion, and symbolism. In an era where many horror films feel compelled to spell out their mythology, Hokum allows mystery to remain unsettlingly intact.

The Prognosis:

Hokum is another strong entry in Damian McCarthy’s growing body of work — a haunting, folkloric meditation on grief, identity, and transformation wrapped inside an eerie one-location nightmare.

Atmospheric, psychologically rich horror that finds beauty in decay and terror in rebirth.

  • Saul Muerte

Rituals in Ruin: 28 Years Later: Bone Temple (2026)

25 Saturday Apr 2026

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There is a point, deep into 28 Years Later: Bone Temple, where the infection — once a visceral, immediate terror — gives way to something far more unsettling: myth. Not just survival, not just rage, but ritual. What emerges from the ashes of civilisation is not merely chaos, but structure — and with it, a far more disquieting question about what humanity becomes when it has time to adapt to horror.

If earlier entries in the franchise were defined by urgency and collapse, Bone Temple is defined by aftermath.

From Infection to Ideology

Where 28 Days Later thrived on momentum — the frantic unravelling of society — Bone Temple slows the pulse to examine what lingers. The infected are no longer simply a threat; they are part of an ecosystem, one that survivors have begun to interpret, mythologise, even weaponise.

The titular “Bone Temple” is less a location than an idea — a manifestation of humanity’s desperate need to impose meaning on the incomprehensible. Structures built from death, rituals carved out of trauma, belief systems emerging in the vacuum left behind by the old world.

This is horror evolving into anthropology.

Nia DaCosta’s Controlled Descent

Under the direction of Nia DaCosta, the film takes on a markedly different tonal register from its predecessors. Where once chaos reigned, DaCosta imposes a sense of deliberate control — not to diminish the horror, but to refine it.

Her approach is patient, almost observational. She allows dread to accumulate rather than erupt, trusting the audience to sit within discomfort. It’s a bold pivot that may alienate those expecting relentless intensity, but it ultimately enriches the film’s thematic ambitions. DaCosta is less interested in jump scares than in cultural decay, in how societies rebuild themselves around trauma.

The Aesthetic of Decay

Visually, the film leans into a stark, almost reverential depiction of ruin. Landscapes feel less abandoned than reclaimed, nature and decay intertwining with the remnants of human architecture. There is a quiet, oppressive beauty to it — a sense that the world has moved on, even if humanity has not.

The camera lingers. It observes. It allows the audience to sit within this new order, rather than recoil from it.

And in doing so, it reinforces the film’s central thesis: that horror, when sustained long enough, ceases to be an interruption and becomes a state of being.

Performance and Presence

At the centre of this evolving world stands Ralph Fiennes, delivering a performance that is as measured as it is magnetic. There is a quiet authority to his presence — one that suggests a man who has not only survived the collapse, but adapted to it in ways that are morally ambiguous at best.

Fiennes resists grandiosity. Instead, he leans into restraint, allowing subtle shifts in expression and tone to carry weight. It is a performance that mirrors the film itself: controlled, deliberate, and quietly unsettling.

Violence Recontextualised

The violence here is markedly different from the raw, chaotic brutality of earlier instalments. It is no less shocking, but it is more deliberate. Where once it was survival-driven, now it carries intention — ritualistic, symbolic, sometimes even performative.

This shift is crucial. It reframes the infected not just as antagonists, but as catalysts for transformation. The real horror lies not in their existence, but in how the uninfected respond to it.

Sound, Memory, and Cultural Echoes

One of the film’s most striking sequences is underscored by the unmistakable presence of Iron Maiden — a choice that feels both anachronistic and eerily appropriate. The music cuts through the film’s otherwise restrained sonic landscape, injecting a jolt of cultural memory into a world that has largely lost its connection to the past.

It’s a reminder that even in collapse, fragments of identity persist. Music, like ritual, becomes a bridge between what was and what remains.

Echoes of the Past

Fans of the original will find a quiet but meaningful connection in the appearance of Cillian Murphy, whose cameo serves less as fan service and more as a spectral reminder of the franchise’s origins. His presence underscores the passage of time — not just within the narrative, but within the cultural memory of the series itself.

It is brief, but resonant.

A Demanding Evolution

This is not a film interested in easy engagement.

Its pacing is measured, occasionally to the point of frustration. Its narrative resists clear answers, favouring ambiguity and thematic exploration over plot-driven clarity. Characters are often secondary to the world they inhabit — vessels through which ideas are explored rather than traditional protagonists to root for.

For some, this will feel like a betrayal of the franchise’s origins.

For others, it will feel like its natural evolution.

The Prognosis:

28 Years Later: Bone Temple is a bold, highbrow extension of a franchise that could easily have settled into repetition. Instead, it pivots toward something more reflective, more unsettling, and ultimately more enduring.

A meditative, ritualistic descent into post-apocalyptic identity, where the true horror is not the infection, but the meaning we build around it.

  • Saul Muerte

Playtime Turns Predatory: Dolly

23 Thursday Apr 2026

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There is a familiar rhythm to Dolly, a film that arrives wrapped in the well-worn trappings of captivity horror and slasher sensibilities, yet occasionally hints at something more psychologically curious beneath its surface. Premiering as a Shudder original, it treads a precarious line between formula and subversion — rarely straying too far from the former, but not entirely devoid of the latter.

A Familiar Game of Survival

At its core, Dolly is disarmingly simple. A young woman, Macy — played with a grounded resilience by Fabianne Therese — is abducted by a grotesque, childlike figure intent on “raising” her. The premise is unsettling in theory, tapping into distorted notions of family, control, and psychological regression.

In execution, however, the film largely adheres to a paint-by-numbers structure. The beats are recognisable: capture, resistance, escalation, and survival. Tension rises and falls in expected intervals, rarely deviating from the genre’s established blueprint.

Flashes Beneath the Surface

And yet, it would be reductive to dismiss Dolly entirely.

There are fleeting moments — brief, almost intrusive — where the film gestures toward a more complex identity. The central antagonist, portrayed with unnerving physicality by Max the Impaler, carries a disquieting blend of menace and arrested development. The idea of imposed infantilisation, of forced dependency, lingers as an underexplored but compelling thematic thread.

Similarly, the inclusion of dark humour — often abrupt, sometimes jarring — suggests a film aware of its own absurdity, even if it struggles to fully integrate that awareness into a cohesive tone.

Violence as Punctuation

Where Dolly finds its most immediate impact is in its bursts of gore. These moments arrive sporadically, punctuating the narrative with flashes of brutality that momentarily jolt the film to life.

They are effective, if fleeting — less a sustained atmosphere of dread than intermittent reminders of the stakes. In this sense, the film operates more as a sequence of peaks and valleys than a steadily mounting crescendo.

The Weight of Simplicity

The film’s greatest strength — its simplicity — ultimately becomes its limitation.

By adhering so closely to familiar genre mechanics, Dolly never quite earns the psychological depth it gestures toward. Its exploration of trauma, control, and identity remains surface-level, hinted at rather than interrogated.

Even performances from recognisable faces like Seann William Scott and Ethan Suplee feel underutilised, existing more as texture than as integral components of the narrative.

The Prognosis:

Dolly is a film caught between impulses — the desire to deliver straightforward genre thrills and the ambition to probe something darker, more psychological. It succeeds intermittently on both fronts, but never fully commits to either.

A serviceable slasher with flashes of twisted promise, where moments of gore and uneasy humour briefly break through an otherwise familiar and simplistic framework.

  • Saul Muerte

Dolly streams on Shudder from Fri 24th April.

Fog, Fire and Frustration: Silent Hill at 20 — and the Return We Didn’t Need

20 Monday Apr 2026

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Few video game adaptations have arrived with the weight of expectation quite like Silent Hill. At a time when the genre was still struggling to shake off its reputation for shallow cash-ins, director Christophe Gans sought to do something different — to translate not just the iconography of Silent Hill, but its suffocating atmosphere, its psychological dread, and its nightmarish symbolism.

Twenty years on, the result remains… conflicted.

A Faithful Descent into Atmosphere

There’s no denying that Silent Hill (2006) looks the part. Gans’ film is drenched in ash, fog, and decay — a visual language that mirrors the oppressive tone of the original games. The production design is meticulous, bringing to life a town that feels both abandoned and alive with malevolent intent.

Creatures like Pyramid Head and the twitching nurses are rendered with a fidelity that borders on reverence, capturing the grotesque beauty that made the games so iconic. In this sense, Silent Hill succeeds where many adaptations of its era — including entries in the Resident Evil franchise — often prioritised action over atmosphere.

Gans understands that Silent Hill is not about survival in the traditional sense. It’s about punishment. About guilt. About the horrors we construct within ourselves.

Style Over Substance

And yet, for all its aesthetic triumphs, the film struggles under the weight of its own ambition.

The narrative — centred on Rose’s search for her missing daughter — becomes increasingly convoluted as it attempts to weave together multiple strands of lore. Exposition is delivered in heavy, often clunky bursts, culminating in a third act that feels less like revelation and more like overload.

What works in the interactive, interpretive space of a video game becomes far more rigid on screen. The ambiguity that defines the Silent Hill experience is replaced by over-explanation, stripping the story of much of its psychological potency.

It’s a film caught between two impulses: the desire to remain faithful, and the need to translate that faithfulness into a coherent cinematic narrative.

A High Point in Game Adaptations… Almost

Despite its flaws, Silent Hill still stands as one of the more ambitious video game adaptations of its time. It dared to take the source material seriously, to embrace its darkness rather than dilute it for mainstream appeal.

But ambition alone isn’t enough.

The film remains visually striking, tonally committed, and undeniably influential — yet ultimately uneven. A beautiful nightmare that never quite finds its footing.

A visually faithful adaptation that captures the look of Silent Hill, but not always its soul.

A Return Lost in the Fog

Fast forward two decades, and Gans returns to the franchise with Return to Silent Hill — a film that promises to revisit the psychological depths of the series, this time drawing heavily from Silent Hill 2.

What unfolds, however, is a far more frustrating experience.

Guilt Without Clarity

The premise is compelling: James, drawn back to Silent Hill by a mysterious letter from his lost love, descends into a world shaped by his own guilt and fractured psyche.

On paper, this is the series at its most potent.

In execution, it becomes a muddled, overly complicated narrative that struggles to balance psychological introspection with coherent storytelling. Where the 2006 film over-explained, Return to Silent Hill paradoxically feels both overstuffed and underdeveloped — layering symbolism without grounding it in emotional clarity.

When Faithfulness Becomes a Trap

Gans once again demonstrates a keen eye for visual detail. The town is as oppressive as ever, the creatures as grotesque, the atmosphere as suffocating.

But this time, the aesthetic fidelity feels hollow.

The film leans so heavily into recreating the imagery and themes of the games that it forgets to function as a film in its own right. Characters drift through the narrative rather than driving it, and the emotional core — so crucial to Silent Hill 2’s enduring impact — is lost in a haze of convoluted plotting.

A Misguided Return

Where Silent Hill (2006) faltered but remained admirable in its ambition, Return to Silent Hill feels like a step backward — a film that mistakes complexity for depth and reverence for understanding.

It’s a reminder that adapting Silent Hill is not simply about recreating its imagery, but about capturing the fragile, deeply human emotions that underpin its horror.

And here, that connection is sorely lacking.

Visually committed but narratively incoherent, a return that loses itself in the very fog it seeks to explore.

The Prognosis:

Together, these two films form an uneasy legacy.

One is an ambitious, flawed attempt to bring a landmark game to life.
The other, a misjudged return that proves just how difficult that task truly is.

Sometimes, the scariest thing about Silent Hill… is how hard it is to escape.

  • Saul Muerte

The Sound of Silence: Undertone (2026)

13 Monday Apr 2026

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There is a quiet audacity to Undertone — a film that dares to strip horror back to its barest components and, in doing so, exposes both the potency and the peril of minimalism. Where many genre efforts lean into excess — of imagery, of narrative, of shock — Undertone instead retreats inward, crafting an experience defined less by what is shown than by what is felt.

It is, for better and worse, a film built on absence.

Less as Language

Minimalism in cinema is often misunderstood as restraint for its own sake. In Undertone, it becomes a language — one that communicates through negative space, elongated silence, and the careful withholding of information.

The narrative itself is skeletal, almost deliberately so, allowing themes of grief, emotional suppression, and psychological entrapment to seep through the cracks rather than announce themselves outright. Characters feel less like fully articulated individuals and more like vessels for internal states — fractured, repressed, and quietly unraveling.

This approach is undeniably immersive… but also demanding.

The Power of Sound

If Undertone has a defining strength, it lies in its sonic architecture.

Sound here is not merely accompaniment — it is the film’s primary instrument of tension. Subtle shifts in tone, the intrusion of low-frequency hums, the absence of expected auditory cues — all contribute to a sense of unease that lingers beneath the surface.

In many ways, Undertone aligns itself with traditions of psychological horror that privilege atmosphere over spectacle. It understands that fear often resides not in what we see, but in what we anticipate — and what we cannot quite place.

The result is a film that listens as much as it shows.

The Slow Burn of Suppression

Thematically, Undertone is preoccupied with what happens when emotion is buried rather than expressed. Grief, in particular, becomes a suffocating presence — not explosive, but corrosive. It manifests in the stillness, in the hesitation, in the inability of its characters to confront what lies beneath.

This is horror as internalised pressure.

The pacing reflects this intent. Scenes linger. Moments stretch. Time itself feels elongated, mirroring the psychological stasis of its characters. For some, this will read as hypnotic — an invitation to sit within discomfort. For others, it may verge on inertia.

Minimalism as Double-Edged Sword

And here lies the film’s central tension.

The same minimalism that gives Undertone its identity also limits its reach. The scarcity of overt scares, the deliberate narrative opacity, and the glacial pacing risk alienating viewers who seek more immediate engagement.

There are moments where the film feels on the cusp of revelation — where its restraint might give way to something more tangible — only to retreat once again into ambiguity. This can be frustrating, particularly when the emotional payoff does not fully match the investment required.

Yet to criticise Undertone for this is also to acknowledge its commitment. It refuses to compromise its vision, even when that vision narrows its audience.

The Prognosis:

Undertone is a film that exists in the margins — of sound, of space, of emotion. It is an exercise in restraint that occasionally teeters into limitation, but never without purpose.

A haunting, slow-burning meditation on grief and suppression, where minimalism becomes both its greatest strength and its most significant constraint.

  • Saul Muerte

Undertone is currently screening in cinemas nationwide

Ready or Not… It’s Hunting Season Again

07 Tuesday Apr 2026

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5…4…3…2…1…. Ready or not, here it comes!

A sequel to 2019’s Ready or Not.

There are many angles this review could take, but regular readers will probably think we’ll go through the Six Qualities that make a good sequel checklist. And you’d be right.

  • Does it respect the first film and not shit on it?
  • Is it just a carbon copy of the first film?
  • Is it just a carbon copy of the first film, but “bigger” and nothing more?
  • Does it add/expand on the legend/universe started by the first film?
  • Does it still stay within the SAME SPIRIT established by the first film?
  • Does it stand on its own 2 feet as a standalone film?

Before we go through these points, just a quick recap. In the first movie a young woman – Grace – marries into an uber rich family. It’s established she has no living relatives, so marrying for big love and even bigger money is pretty much jackpot for her! Cue the night of the wedding, and Grace’s new husband tells her his clan has a tradition where any newcomer must play a game with them. Over the years they have made a fortune selling boardgames, so as traditions go, it’s quirky more than weird. That is until Grace pulls a playing card to determine what kind of game they’ll be enjoying, and the card says “hide ‘n’ seek”. Said fam then all try and kill Grace in their giant mansion by sunrise – otherwise their mysterious benefactor; who has bestowed upon them all their family’s good fortune and glory – will be displeased. And will appear and kill them all if Grace is not caught. And the dude is basically the devil.

So onto movie 2, which would have been waaaay cooler if the #2 hadn’t appeared in the title. I mean from a marketing perspective I get it, people are idiots, but if the sequel to Ready or Not was just actually Ready or Not, Here I Come… that would have been awesome along the lines of Aliens to Alien. Prey to Predator. Happy Death Day 2U to Happy Death Day. As this fits into Point # 7 (which is not mandatory) Does it have a cool title that doesn’t have a number tagged on the end (like most sequels do) or a subtitle? Eg: Indiana Jones and the ever- decreasing quality of adventure.

Anyway – this new instalment literally picks up from the last scene of the last movie, and Grace – it is revealed – has a sister! And if you think that feels like a jammed in retcon, you’d be right. But more on that later. It is also revealed that the family Grace married into is actually one of 6 who have made the same pact with the devil. And as Grace has effectively wiped out one of these families (her former in- laws) the title for head family (think Lannisters versus all the other Houses) is up for grabs. So, one kidnapping later of her and her sister (who is estranged from Grace – of course; ya gotta have sibling conflict) and we have our setting for another round of deadly hide and seek. Whichever family gets to kill Grace before sunrise gets the brass ring (or in this case gold ring) to rule them all; and with it get a ton of world influencing power.

So – going through our points, does this pass the Surgeons’ Pub Test of what makes a good sequel? Does it respect the first film and not shit on it like Highlander 2 did to Highlander?

Well, considering the sister angle was from another script from directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett that they then re-purposed for this movie, you would be forgiven for thinking this could go off the rails ala the plethora of Die Hard movies after 3. But this film is very much in-universe in flavour, and whatever leaps it takes feels natural and earned. Even the explanation as to why Grace has a sister when the first film has her earnestly state she has no siblings, feels acceptable. Sort of. Certainly the fact this bump happens at the start of this movie makes it easier to drive over, as you are still open to seeing if this instalment will be any good.

Is it a carbon copy of the first film? Or a carbon copy, but just bigger? Ie: a re-hash with just more kills – like any number of countless slasher horror sequels, the most offensive in recent memory being I Know What You Did Last Summer Because It’s I Know What You Did last Summer. This is a delicate one for a lot of films, as the main hook for a horror called “hide & seek” is that it should contain characters playing hide and seek. So if this film deviates from that, then it violates point 1. But if it contrives a lazy way to throw Grace into another mansion to be hunted in, then it fails point 2 & 3.

But the set up as to why Grace (and her sister) gets hunted in this film feels well-earned enough to check off point 4, as it expands this movie’s in-universe mythos in a compelling way.

Point 5, does it stay in the same spirit of the last movie? Considering that spirit is an entertaining graphic horror tale with a strong streak of black humour?
Definitely. Two words, bride fight. You’ll get it when you see it.

Point 6 – does it stand up on its own 2 feet? Again, yes. There are multiple reasons why, but one (and this might be a little surprising) is Samara Weaving (who plays Grace). There is no questioning her acting pedigree, but her chops – especially at the gut-wrenching realisation that the nightmare she has just endured is about to happen again – is surprisingly grounded and real. Being in a popcorn movie doesn’t mean you can’t sell it. In fact, it’s one thing to act powerfully with Oscar award winning material. But to draw in an audience in a setting that is meant to be silly fun… some would say that’s where the real game lies.

The Prognosis:

This is a worthy sequel to a film that felt like a nice self-contained B-grade home run. It didn’t need a second instalment, but that didn’t stop the film makers from crushing it. The fun is still there, the jeopardy is still there, and the sister element – whilst at times feels a little forced – doesn’t get in the way of another well executed romp.

Ready or Not… this finds you.

  • Antony Yee 06/04/26

Claws Without Consequence: Grizzly Night (2026)

06 Monday Apr 2026

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“There’s something inherently terrifying about nature turning against us.” It’s a truth that has powered creature features for decades, from Jaws to The Edge. With Grizzly Night, director Burke Doeren attempts to tap into that primal fear, revisiting the real-life 1967 grizzly bear attacks in Glacier National Park — a chilling historical event that, on paper, should provide fertile ground for a gripping survival horror.

Yet despite its harrowing source material, Grizzly Night struggles to translate fact into fear.

A True Story, Softened

The film’s greatest asset is also its most frustrating shortcoming. The true story — two fatal bear attacks occurring on the same night, miles apart — is inherently horrifying, grounded in the unpredictability of nature and the vulnerability of those caught within it.

However, Grizzly Night dilutes that tension with a narrative that feels oddly restrained. Rather than leaning into the raw, chaotic terror of the attacks, the film opts for a more conventional, almost sanitised structure, one that prioritises character set-up over sustained suspense.

The result is a film that never quite captures the immediacy or brutality that its premise demands.

A Cast Left Adrift

The ensemble cast — including Brec Bassinger, Jack Griffo, and Oded Fehr — bring a level of professionalism to the material, but are ultimately underserved by a script that struggles to give them depth.

Characters are sketched in broad strokes: the carefree campers, the cautious authority figures, the inevitable victims. While there are attempts to build emotional stakes, these moments often feel rushed, making it difficult to fully invest in their fates when the inevitable attacks occur.

Even seasoned performers are left navigating a narrative that rarely allows them to elevate the material.

Tension That Never Quite Bites

For a film centred on two brutal animal attacks, Grizzly Night is surprisingly light on genuine suspense. Doeren shows flashes of promise in isolated moments — the stillness of the forest, the creeping sense that something unseen is watching — but these are too often undercut by uneven pacing and predictable execution.

Where the film falters most is in its depiction of the bears themselves. Whether constrained by budget or creative choices, the attacks lack the visceral impact needed to make them truly unsettling. In a genre where physical threat is paramount, this absence is keenly felt.

Comparisons to more effective natural horror films are inevitable, and unfortunately not in Grizzly Night’s favour.

A Director Finding His Footing

As a feature debut, Grizzly Night offers glimpses of Burke Doeren’s potential. There is an understanding of atmosphere in certain sequences, and a clear ambition to tell a grounded, fact-based horror story without resorting to excessive sensationalism.

However, the film ultimately feels like a director still finding his voice. The balance between realism and tension remains elusive, and the storytelling lacks the confidence needed to fully capitalise on its premise.

The Prognosis:

Grizzly Night is a frustrating near-miss — a film built on a deeply unsettling true story that never quite harnesses its full potential. While there are moments that hint at a more effective, atmospheric thriller, they are too few and far between to leave a lasting impression.

A restrained and uneven natural horror that proves the real events were far more terrifying than their cinematic retelling.

  • Saul Muerte

Bad Taste as Baptism: Fuck My Son! (2026)

04 Saturday Apr 2026

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There are films that provoke… and then there are films that weaponise provocation as their entire identity.
Fuck My Son!, directed by Todd Rohal, firmly belongs in the latter camp — a grotesque, confrontational descent into taboo that feels less like storytelling and more like an endurance test.

Adapted from the underground comic by Johnny Ryan, the film embraces its origins with unapologetic aggression. Narrative coherence is secondary. Characterisation is almost incidental. What matters here is impact — how far it can push, how hard it can hit, and how long an audience can withstand the onslaught before recoiling.

The Aesthetics of Offence

Rohal’s approach is not without craft. In fact, what makes Fuck My Son! so confronting is how deliberately constructed it is. This is not chaos by accident — it is chaos curated.

The practical creature effects, in particular, demand attention. There is a tactile, squirm-inducing quality to the film’s physical grotesqueries that places it in lineage with boundary-pushing auteurs who understand that revulsion is most effective when it feels real. Flesh stretches. Fluids flow. The body becomes both canvas and battleground.

In an age of digital sanitisation, this commitment to the physical image is perversely admirable.

Taboo as Currency

But provocation, when used as currency, quickly devalues itself.

The film’s central conceit — deliberately offensive, aggressively transgressive — initially shocks, then unsettles, and eventually… numbs. Without thematic grounding or emotional counterpoint, the transgression begins to feel repetitive rather than revelatory.

This is where Fuck My Son! falters.

The most effective works of extreme cinema often use taboo as a gateway to deeper commentary — on society, morality, repression. Here, the suggestion of meaning is fleeting at best. The film gestures toward satire, but rarely commits to it.

Know Your Audience

And yet, to dismiss the film outright would be to misunderstand its purpose.

There is an audience for this. A dedicated, discerning subset of genre fans who seek out the extreme not for narrative satisfaction, but for experiential confrontation. For them, Fuck My Son! is not a failure — it is a badge of honour. A film to be survived, debated, and worn like a scar.

It is cinema as dare.

The Prognosis:

Fuck My Son! is not interested in pleasing you. It barely cares if you understand it. It exists to provoke, to repel, and to challenge the limits of what can be put on screen.

A technically committed but narratively hollow exercise in taboo, elevated by its practical effects and sustained only by the endurance of its audience.

  • Saul Muerte

Fuck My Son will be screening at select cinemas from Apr 9 for a limited time.

Filth, Flesh and Freedom: A Brief History of Trash Cinema

Love, Blood and the Loss of Shadow: Dracula (2025)

02 Thursday Apr 2026

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There is something perversely fitting about Luc Besson tackling the story of Dracula — a filmmaker long enamoured with heightened emotion, operatic visuals, and characters driven by obsession. With Dracula, Besson does not so much adapt the myth as he attempts to drown it in longing, reframing the Prince of Darkness as a tragic romantic caught in an eternal spiral of grief, rage, and devotion.

It’s a bold swing.

But one that doesn’t always draw blood.

A Vampire in Love with Loss

Besson’s Dracula leans heavily into the oft-explored notion that monstrosity is born not of evil, but of heartbreak. The film traces Vlad’s transformation from mortal prince to cursed immortal, driven by the brutal loss of his bride and his subsequent renunciation of faith.

It’s familiar terrain — territory previously carved out with gothic grandeur in Bram Stoker’s Dracula — yet Besson strips away much of the baroque sensuality that defined that iteration, replacing it with something colder, more abstract.

The result is a film that feels emotionally intense, yet curiously distant.

Where the gothic tradition thrives on atmosphere — on shadows, candlelight, decay — Besson opts for a cleaner, more stylised visual language. His Dracula exists in a world that is visually striking, but rarely suffocating. The rot beneath the surface is implied, not felt.

And in a story like this, that absence matters.

Performances That Bleed Through the Fog

What anchors the film — what almost saves it from its own indulgence — are its performances.

Caleb Landry Jones delivers a portrayal of Vlad that is as fragile as it is feral. There’s a volatility to his performance, a sense that beneath the stillness lies something constantly threatening to fracture. His Dracula is not a figure of dominance, but of disintegration — a man hollowed out by grief and sustained only by obsession.

Opposite him, Christoph Waltz brings his trademark precision, injecting the film with moments of clarity and control. Where Jones spirals, Waltz steadies. It’s a dynamic that gives the film its most compelling exchanges — brief flashes where character overtakes spectacle.

And yet, even these performances struggle against the film’s broader uncertainty.

Style Over Myth

Besson has always been a visual storyteller first, and Dracula is no exception. The film is filled with striking imagery — battlefields soaked in blood, vast landscapes frozen in time, bodies moving through space with an almost dreamlike detachment.

But style, here, becomes a double-edged sword.

In prioritising visual expression over narrative clarity, the film allows its mythology to drift. The rules of this world — its logic, its structure — become increasingly opaque, leaving the audience to navigate a story that feels more like a sequence of emotional impressions than a cohesive arc.

This is where the film falters most.

Because Dracula, as a figure, thrives on myth. On clearly defined boundaries between life and death, sacred and profane, desire and damnation. When those boundaries blur too far, the character risks losing his shape.

And here, he occasionally does.

The Missing Gothic Pulse

Perhaps the film’s most surprising omission is its lack of true gothic weight.

For all its talk of damnation and eternal suffering, Dracula rarely feels haunted. The atmosphere — that essential ingredient of any great vampire tale — is present in fragments, but never fully realised.

In stepping away from the heavy shadows and oppressive dread that have long defined the character, Besson creates something more ethereal… but also less impactful.

It’s a Dracula without fangs.

The Prognosis:

Dracula (2025) is a film caught between impulses — romance and horror, spectacle and substance, myth and mood. It reaches for operatic tragedy but often finds itself lost in its own aesthetic.

And yet, there is enough here — in its performances, in its ambition — to keep it from collapsing entirely.

A visually striking, emotionally charged reimagining that gets lost in the romance, leaving its mythology and gothic soul just out of reach.

A vampire story that longs for eternity… but struggles to leave a lasting bite.

  • Saul Muerte

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