Category Archives: Movie review

Possession Without Passion: The Missed Potential of An American Haunting

05 Wednesday Nov 2025

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“Possession knows no bounds,” the tagline warns, though sadly, the film’s imagination does. An American Haunting attempts to bring the notorious Bell Witch legend to cinematic life, boasting the acting pedigree of Donald Sutherland and Sissy Spacek, yet even their combined gravitas can’t save this otherwise weightless ghost story from dissipating into the fog.

Set in 19th-century Tennessee, the film follows the devout Bell family as they are tormented by an invisible force that grows increasingly violent. Courtney Solomon anchors the narrative in a quasi-historical framing device, flashing between the period setting and modern-day correspondences — a decision that feels more distracting than illuminating. The supposed authenticity of the haunting, drawn from one of America’s most enduring supernatural legends, is buried beneath layers of slick art direction and overwrought emotional manipulation.

There are moments where the film almost succeeds. Solomon’s use of stark winter landscapes and period detail captures a genuine sense of isolation and religious repression. The interplay between faith, guilt, and patriarchal authority hints at a deeper psychological reading — particularly in the film’s controversial subtext of abuse and repression. Yet these glimpses of ambition are undermined by generic jump scares and erratic pacing, reducing what might have been an eerie meditation on American folklore into a routine exercise in gothic excess.

Sutherland delivers a sturdy, if uninspired, performance as the tormented patriarch John Bell, while Spacek provides the emotional centre as the devout matriarch, stoic but visibly cracking under the strain. Their efforts, however, are let down by a screenplay that offers them little beyond reaction shots to unseen horrors. The younger cast members, including Rachel Hurd-Wood as daughter Betsy, fare better in the moments of pure terror — though even these are undercut by inconsistent visual effects and abrupt tonal shifts.

The film’s conclusion, which attempts to blend historical tragedy with supernatural justice, arrives with the subtlety of a hammer blow. What should feel revelatory instead plays as exploitative and confused, failing to commit to either psychological realism or full-blooded horror fantasy.

The Prognosis:

An American Haunting ultimately joins the long line of early-2000s supernatural thrillers that mistake gloss for gravitas. For all its promise of ancestral dread and spectral vengeance, what lingers isn’t fear, but fatigue — a ghost story that haunts itself with the shadow of what it could have been.

  • Saul Muerte

Drained of Dread: Abraham’s Boys Offers a Tepid Take on the Van Helsing Curse

05 Wednesday Nov 2025

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Joe Hill’s short story Abraham’s Boys offered a quietly haunting coda to the Dracula mythos — a modern Gothic in miniature, soaked in melancholy and generational trauma. Unfortunately, this Shudder-exclusive adaptation struggles to translate that restrained power to the screen. What emerges is a film that mistakes heavy exposition for emotional weight and loses the eerie ambiguity that made Hill’s prose hang in the air.

Set in the American Midwest, the film imagines Abraham Van Helsing as a broken patriarch trying to protect his sons, Max and Rudy, from the supernatural horrors he once fought. It’s a bold premise — relocating Stoker’s world from the fog of Europe to the dust and decay of small-town America — but in doing so, the film sheds the very atmosphere that defined the Gothic. The Midwest may hold its ghosts, but here it feels oddly sterile, a backdrop devoid of menace or mystique.

Even more jarring is the notion that Van Helsing, once defined by faith and obsession, would settle down with Mina Harker and start a family. The choice feels not only implausible but thematically tone-deaf, undercutting the tragic consequences of their shared history. The result is a domestic melodrama stitched awkwardly to a monster myth that deserved grander treatment.

There are flashes of something worthwhile — the strained father-son dynamic occasionally hints at the emotional brutality Hill conjured in his story, and the film’s final moments attempt to reclaim some of its literary melancholy. But it’s too little, too late. Abraham’s Boys: A Dracula Story is a gothic without a heart, a reimagining that leaves both the horror and the humanity of its lineage drained.

The Prognosis:

A well-intentioned expansion of Joe Hill’s world that fails to capture his haunting tone or Stoker’s legacy. The bloodline runs thin.

  • Saul Muerte

Abraham’s Boys: A Dracula Story will be streaming on Shudder from Thurs 6th Nov.

The Evil Dead (1981): The Birth of DIY Carnage

29 Wednesday Oct 2025

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There’s something unholy about watching The Evil Dead in 2025 — not because of its gore (though the film still bleeds like a fresh wound), but because it reminds us how much horror has changed… and how much it owes to Sam Raimi’s twisted weekend in the woods.

Before franchises, before multiverses, before horror was a business plan — there was a group of friends in Tennessee, gallons of fake blood, and a Super 8 camera that barely held together. Raimi, Bruce Campbell, and producer Robert Tapert didn’t just make a film; they conjured one from sheer madness and duct tape. Every camera move, every shriek, every ash-smeared close-up feels like it was carved from the flesh of invention itself.

The Evil Dead isn’t just about possession — it’s about obsession. You can feel Raimi’s fever in every frame, the urge to push the medium past breaking point. Long before the word “indie” became shorthand for Sundance polish, this film was truly independent: reckless, raw, and glorious in its imperfection. Its claustrophobic energy turns the forest into a sentient entity, the cabin into a cursed organism. You can smell the wood rot, the sweat, the 16mm stock tearing in the projector.

What keeps it alive isn’t nostalgia — it’s rhythm. Raimi’s kinetic camera was punk cinema incarnate, years before digital tools democratised motion. That manic momentum, that willingness to risk everything for a shot, became the DNA of countless filmmakers who came after — from Peter Jackson’s Braindead to modern found-footage auteurs chasing the same fever dream.

Yet for all its brutality, there’s an innocence to The Evil Dead. It’s a film made by people who loved horror so much, they wanted to crawl inside it. Raimi’s signature blend of cruelty and comedy — later refined in Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness — starts here as an unfiltered scream. It’s clumsy, beautiful, and unforgettable.

In a cinematic age obsessed with IP and polish, The Evil Dead stands as a reminder that horror thrives on imperfection. It’s about spirit, not studio notes. It’s about throwing your friends into the mud and making something that feels like it might actually hurt you to watch.

The Prognosis:

Horror cinema has evolved in scale and sophistication, but few films still pulse with the same unhinged energy. Raimi’s debut is a masterclass in fearless filmmaking — a symphony of shrieks, sweat, and splintered wood that reminds us why terror should never feel safe.

  • Saul Muerte

THE EVIL DEAD – BUY OR RENT NOW

Toxic Avenger (2025): The Return of Filth and Fury

29 Wednesday Oct 2025

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Some monsters crawl back from the grave; others crawl from the sewer.
With The Toxic Avenger (2025), writer-director Macon Blair has achieved something bordering on alchemy — turning the sludge of 1980s exploitation cinema into a molten reflection of our contemporary world. It’s less a remake than a resurrection: a grotesque, heartfelt eulogy for a time when bad taste was an act of rebellion.

The original 1984 Toxic Avenger was pure Troma chaos — an anarchic cocktail of slime, slapstick, and splatter. It was both anti-superhero and anti-society, gleefully dismembering the Reagan-era obsession with moral cleanliness. Blair’s revival doesn’t sanitise that legacy; it weaponises it. If the first film was a punk scream from the gutter, the new one is a howl echoing from the biohazard bin of late capitalism.

Peter Dinklage’s portrayal of Winston Gooze — a meek janitor transformed into a radioactive antihero — anchors the absurdity with tragic weight. Dinklage plays the part not for camp, but for catharsis: his deformity becomes the mirror of a system that feeds on deforming its own. Kevin Bacon’s villainous corporate baron, all Botox and bile, feels like a mutant descendant of every Troma CEO caricature — but here, he’s horrifyingly real.

Blair’s vision retains Troma’s vulgar spirit while finding unexpected poetry in the putrescence. His Toxic Avenger is as much about class rage and environmental collapse as it is about geysers of green goo. Every viscera-slick punch lands with the melancholy of a generation choking on the toxins it helped create. The violence is ludicrous, yes, but the laughter catches in the throat — this is camp reimagined as ecological despair.

What’s remarkable is how The Toxic Avenger feels simultaneously nostalgic and corrosively modern. Blair pays homage to Lloyd Kaufman’s transgressive humour, but refracts it through the aesthetics of contemporary superhero fatigue. His monster isn’t an accident of nuclear waste but of bureaucracy — a man destroyed by the very infrastructures meant to protect him.
The film’s gore set-pieces are less about indulgence than excess as indictment: when the blood sprays, it sprays neon, irony, and sorrow.

There’s an undercurrent of empathy that never existed in the original. Blair, ever the humanist even amidst the carnage, treats his freaks with tenderness. The mutants, misfits, and malformed are no longer punchlines; they’re the ones inheriting the Earth — or what’s left of it. It’s as though the spirit of Troma grew up, got angry, and learned how to aim its sludge cannon.

The Prognosis:

In the landscape of 2025 horror, where clean franchises and polished dread dominate, The Toxic Avenger feels like a badly needed contamination. It reminds us that horror’s job isn’t always to terrify — sometimes, it’s to repulse, provoke, and unsettle in the service of truth. Blair’s remake drips with the very stuff most studios would rather wash away.

And that’s precisely why it matters.
Because amid the algorithmic uniformity of modern genre filmmaking, The Toxic Avenger dares to be disgusting — and in doing so, it becomes pure again.

  • Saul Muerte

THE TOXIC AVENGER – BUY OR RENT NOW

Hell House LLC: Lineage — The Ghost of a Franchise Haunted by Its Own Myth

27 Monday Oct 2025

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Across five films, Stephen Cognetti has quietly built one of the more curious mythologies in modern horror — a patchwork of haunted architecture, cursed tapes, and cyclical tragedy orbiting the ghostly epicentre of the Abaddon Hotel. Hell House LLC: Lineage seeks to close this circle, but in doing so, becomes trapped within it.

Forsaking the found-footage style that once defined the franchise, Cognetti’s latest entry opts for a more traditional, narrative form. It’s an understandable evolution — and yet one that inadvertently severs the series from its greatest source of dread: immediacy. Where Hell House LLC (2015) thrived on grainy footage and fractured perspective, Lineage feels distant, almost elegiac. Its horrors unfold with the politeness of recollection rather than the panic of experience.

At the centre is Vanessa Shepherd (Elizabeth Vermilyea), a woman tethered to Abaddon by blood and dream, her life dissolving beneath the weight of inherited trauma. Vermilyea brings a weary conviction to the role, grounding the supernatural within something painfully human — grief as a form of haunting. Around her, Cognetti threads familiar motifs: the flicker of dying light, the whisper of unseen presences, the inescapable architecture of fate. These moments remind us why the director’s early work resonated — his ability to make space itself feel sentient.

But Lineage, for all its ambition, buckles under the burden of its own mythology. The film drifts between closure and repetition, explaining away its mysteries rather than deepening them. The Abaddon myth — once an unknowable wound — becomes over-articulated, every secret illuminated until nothing remains in shadow. What was once terrifying for its ambiguity now feels embalmed by overexposure.

Cognetti’s direction still glimmers with craft — a movement in the periphery, a dissonant hum in the sound design — yet the sense of discovery is gone. Lineage isn’t so much a haunting as it is a requiem, mourning what the series once was: a small, scrappy miracle of lo-fi horror ingenuity.

The Prognosis:

Hell House LLC: Lineage closes the curtain with a sigh rather than a scream. It is a ghost story about the exhaustion of storytelling itself — beautiful in fragments, hollow in execution. The Abaddon Hotel may still echo, but the fear has long since checked out.

  • Saul Muerte

Buried Truths & Walking Away: Why Weapons (2025) Matters

27 Monday Oct 2025

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From the sinewy shock of Barbarian, Zach Cregger already marked himself as a horror director to watch. With Weapons, he doesn’t just advance — he detonates expectations. This second feature is not merely a follow-up; it’s a recalibration. It announces that horror’s pulse today beats in the fissures beneath the suburban façade, in the worn edges of trust, in the vanishing of innocence — and in the uncomfortable realisation that the scariest weapon might already be inside us.

Disappearance as the new nightmare

The opening image of Weapons is deceptively simple: at exactly 2:17 a.m., seventeen third-graders leave their homes in a quiet Pennsylvania town and vanish. One child remains. One teacher becomes suspect. One grieving parent begins to hunt. On paper, it’s a disappearance-mystery. In execution, it becomes a sprawling meditation on what gets lost when the promise of security dissolves. Wikipedia+2High On Films+2

Here, Cregger takes the school as a metaphor for safety, the teacher as a figure of authority, the parent as wounded faith. But the vanishing children — they become more than victims; they are the unlost ghosts of generational damage. As one analyst proffers, the “weapons” of the title are not just guns or hooks, but systems: fear, manipulation, the warp of hope. High On Films+1

Style, structure and the fracture of form

What distinguishes Weapons is how formal mechanics mirror thematic unease. Cregger and cinematographer Larkin Seiple create a visual rhythm that is at once pristine and off-kilter: children running in long-takes, snow-white lawns under dawn light, the teacher caught in surveillance shots, the father hidden behind phone-screens. NME+1

The narrative fractures into multiple perspectives: the teacher (Julia Garner), the parent (Josh Brolin), the cop (Alden Ehrenreich), the one remaining child (Cary Christopher). The result is less a linear mystery and more a mosaic of dread. As one review put it: “It’s a puzzle you’re almost too afraid to solve”. Heaven of Horror+1

This is significant because horror today often demands instantaneous clarity; Weapons gives the opposite. It gives blur, ambiguity, the feeling that you’re running in corridors of your own assumptions. In its uncertainty lies its power.

Grief, legacy and the weight of genre

Cregger has admitted that the film was born of very personal trauma — the sudden death of a close friend. Polygon+1 This grief is not neatly transmuted into “the monster”, but folded into the film’s architecture: the teacher slipping into alcoholism, the parent’s rage, the town complicit in its own blindness.

In this sense, Weapons speaks to horror’s evolving ambition. No longer content with jump-scares or superficial transgression, it invites emotional excavation. The “missing children” are shadows of lost futures; the investigation is a metaphor for the long haul of trauma. That it arrives with mainstream box-office success (grossing in the hundreds of millions) means more: it signals that audiences are open to horror that doesn’t just frighten — it unsettles and lingers. Wikipedia

Why it matters for Halloweekend

As you craft your Halloweekend marathon, Weapons deserves a place not just as a scare-ritual but as a statement piece. It isn’t the easiest watch — the payoff is less about shock and more about reflection. But that makes it an essential counter-balance to more straightforward fright-fests.

It offers:

  • Depth – an exploration of communal wounds rather than a lone killer.
  • Style with substance – formal horror mechanics married to emotional weight.
  • Conversation starter – the kind of film viewers will talk about long after the credits.

This is the horror film that proves the genre still has places left to unearth. In between the classic chills and the fun cult throwbacks, Weapons is the grown-up scare that stays with you when the children have finally gone to bed.

The Prognosis:

Weapons may not offer the catharsis of a neatly tied-up thriller, but perhaps that’s the point. In a world where so much is unresolved, to leave with a question instead of an answer is the greater horror and the greater gift. Cregger invites us into a house of mirrors — only to show that the reflection we fear is our own. Watch it not just for the chills, but for the echo that follows.

  • Saul Muerte

WEAPONS: BUY OR RENT NOW

Weapons (2025): Secrets Buried, Stories Unleashed

Vampire in Brooklyn — When Fangs Meet Farce and Nobody Wins

26 Sunday Oct 2025

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When Vampire in Brooklyn (1995) first hit cinemas, it seemed like a sure thing. Eddie Murphy, still one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, teaming up with horror maestro Wes Craven — fresh off New Nightmare and on the cusp of Scream — for a supernatural horror-comedy that promised both chills and laughs. On paper, it sounded like a bloody good time. In execution, however, it became a messy, tone-deaf experiment caught between two creative egos and a studio unsure of what it wanted.

Murphy, who also co-wrote and co-produced the film, was eager to move beyond the wisecracking cop persona that had defined his career. He envisioned Vampire in Brooklyn as a darker, more serious take on horror — a stylish Gothic thriller with him at its centre as the suave, seductive vampire Maximilian. Paramount, however, saw something very different: a horror-comedy vehicle for its bankable star. What emerged was an uneasy hybrid that fails to find its footing, unsure whether to scare or to entertain.

Craven, ever the craftsman, tries valiantly to balance the clashing tones. There are flashes of his visual flair — an eerie opening sequence aboard a derelict ship, the crimson-lit interiors of Maximilian’s lair, and a few moments that recall his knack for the grotesque. Yet, it’s clear he’s wrestling with a script that doesn’t know what film it wants to be. The result is a workmanlike effort from a director capable of brilliance, dulled by interference and conflicting visions.

Murphy’s performance doesn’t help matters. As Maximilian, he is clearly struggling to play it straight in a film that refuses to let him. Worse still, his multiple side characters — including a shapeshifting preacher and a slick Italian hood — are cartoonish distractions that undercut any atmosphere the film manages to build. The humour feels forced, the scares are neutered, and the pacing plods.

The film’s saving grace is Angela Bassett, whose portrayal of Detective Rita Veder adds depth and gravitas where the script provides little. Bassett commands every frame with her trademark intensity, grounding the absurdity around her with genuine emotional weight. In a better film, her character’s arc — caught between duty and seduction — might have resonated as a modern Gothic tragedy. Here, it merely hints at what Vampire in Brooklyn could have been.

Wes Craven would rebound just a year later with Scream, proving his instincts were still razor-sharp when given the right material. Vampire in Brooklyn, by contrast, feels like a creative crossroads for all involved — a misfire born from too many competing intentions and not enough cohesion.

The Prognosis:

A muddled mix of horror and humour, Vampire in Brooklyn never finds its bite. Caught between Murphy’s comedic impulses and Craven’s horror pedigree, it flails when it should fly. Angela Bassett alone keeps the film from turning to dust, but even she can’t save this lifeless experiment from the shadows.

  • Saul Muerte

Beyond the Crime Scene: Stuart Ortiz and the Cosmic Anatomy of Fear

20 Monday Oct 2025

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In Strange Harvest, Ortiz reshapes the language of true-crime horror, transforming the procedural form into a conduit for cosmic unease — a subtle evolution from his Grave Encounters origins.

In Strange Harvest, Stuart Ortiz — one half of the duo behind Grave Encounters — returns to the found footage-adjacent horror landscape with a surprising degree of control and maturity. Where Grave Encounters (2011) revelled in its haunted asylum chaos and digital distortion, Strange Harvest feels leaner and more deliberate, channelling that same eerie energy into a faux true-crime format that plays like Zodiac meets The Fourth Kind.

The film opens with what seems like a procedural—detectives responding to a welfare check in suburban San Bernardino—but quickly descends into something far darker. A murdered family, strange symbols written in blood, and the re-emergence of a serial killer known as “Mr. Shiny” set the stage for a horror narrative that thrives on implication and dread. Each new crime scene pushes the story further into cosmic territory, hinting at malevolent forces that exist well beyond the scope of human comprehension.

Ortiz demonstrates that he’s learned from over a decade in the horror trenches. His handling of the faux documentary format feels both grounded and authentic, using interviews, news footage, and handheld police recordings to build a layered mythology around the murders. The pacing is steady but tense, and the editing keeps the viewer in that unnerving space between realism and the supernatural — a sweet spot Ortiz has always excelled at.

While the premise is simple, that’s part of its strength. Strange Harvest doesn’t overcomplicate its narrative or chase high-concept spectacle; instead, it leans into its lo-fi authenticity, letting the horror emerge through atmosphere and suggestion. There are shades of procedural TV mixed with cosmic unease, but Ortiz ties it together with a firm grasp of tone and an eye for unsettling imagery.

It’s a testament to Ortiz’s craft that what could have been another run-of-the-mill mockumentary instead feels genuinely unnerving. Strange Harvest proves that the Grave Encounters legacy wasn’t a one-off fluke — Ortiz remains a filmmaker who understands how to weaponise form, texture, and the illusion of truth to make horror hit a little too close to home.

The Prognosis:

A deceptively simple yet chilling faux true-crime horror that tightens the screws through atmosphere and implication. Ortiz’s strongest solo work to date.

  • Saul Muerte

Black Phone 2 — Derrickson Dials Back the Horror, But the Line’s Gone Cold

16 Thursday Oct 2025

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Scott Derrickson returns to familiar ground with Black Phone 2 (2025), a sequel that stretches the eerie premise of his 2022 hit into icier, more supernatural territory — but the call doesn’t quite connect this time.

Set four years after Finney Blake’s (Mason Thames) narrow escape from The Grabber, the film finds the once-traumatised boy struggling to rebuild his life under the weight of memory and unresolved fear. His sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) remains gifted — or cursed — with psychic visions, and when she begins dreaming of three missing boys at a winter camp, the black phone begins to ring again. Only this time, the voice on the other end isn’t just calling from the past — it’s pulling them back into it.

Derrickson, who cut his teeth on Sinister and Deliver Us from Evil, once again demonstrates a clear mastery of atmosphere. His use of light and shadow is chillingly deliberate, and the wintry backdrop gives the sequel a haunting, desaturated beauty that recalls the nightmare logic of A Nightmare on Elm Street crossed with the isolation of Friday the 13th. The cinematography by Brett Jutkiewicz captures frost-bitten textures and dreamlike corridors of fear, keeping the mood taut even when the story falters.

And falter it does. Despite a promising setup, Black Phone 2 struggles to escape the confines of its own mythology. What once felt mysterious and emotionally grounded now feels repetitive and muddled. The attempts to expand The Grabber’s lore — turning him into a supernatural force rather than a disturbed man — rob the story of its primal fear. The original thrived on ambiguity; this sequel over-explains.

Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw both deliver earnest performances, grounding their characters in shared trauma, but they’re hampered by dialogue that’s often clunky and exposition-heavy. Even the film’s pacing, once one of Derrickson’s strong suits, slips into uneven rhythms — long stretches of ghostly visions interrupted by bursts of predictable violence.

Still, credit where it’s due: Derrickson’s visual language remains potent. Echoes of Sinister resonate throughout, from the use of distorted sound design to the flicker of analogue textures, suggesting a filmmaker who still knows how to craft a mood. The Grabber, though used sparingly, continues to terrify — his mask, redesigned with subtle variations, remains one of modern horror’s most unsettling icons.

But for all its chills, Black Phone 2 can’t shake the feeling of déjà vu. It’s a sequel haunted not only by its ghostly antagonist but by the shadow of a stronger predecessor. Derrickson’s talent for visual dread is undeniable — he just needs a story worth listening to again.

The Prognosis:

Black Phone 2 has the atmosphere, tension, and menace you’d expect from Scott Derrickson, but not the clarity or emotional pull that made the original so striking. Despite its best efforts to evolve into a supernatural slasher, this follow-up never quite finds its signal.

In the end, Black Phone 2 just doesn’t have time to thaw out properly — it rings, but the line’s gone cold.

  • Saul Muerte

Watching Herself Unravel — “Other” Struggles to Find Its Focus

13 Monday Oct 2025

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David Moreau, best known for his sleek genre work (Them, The Eye, It Boy), returns to the psychological horror fold with Other — a moody, paranoia-laden mystery that tries to blend domestic trauma with techno-surveillance dread. On paper, it’s an enticing setup: Olga Kurylenko’s Alice returns to her childhood home following her mother’s sudden death, only to find herself under constant watch by a high-tech system that seems to know more about her than she does. What unfolds is a slow burn of suspicion and shadow, where the hum of hidden cameras replaces the creak of haunted floorboards.

There’s an admirable restraint in Moreau’s direction. He builds atmosphere through cold precision — lingering frames, muted lighting, and uneasy stillness — but the payoff rarely matches the setup. The house itself, eerie and static, becomes a sterile stage rather than a vessel for emotional tension. Kurylenko shoulders most of the film’s weight, her performance caught between brittle vulnerability and steely detachment, yet the script gives her little room to evolve beyond a cipher.

Hints of a darker, more personal horror flicker beneath the surface — grief, guilt, and identity all swirl in the static — but the film never fully tunes in. Other wants to be a modern ghost story for the surveillance age, but it feels more like a polished echo of better work.

While there are moments that capture Moreau’s visual confidence — particularly in how the camera mirrors Alice’s fractured psyche — the pacing drags, and the final revelation lands without the intended sting. After last year’s MADS, this feels like a creative step backward: beautifully shot, conceptually intriguing, but emotionally hollow.

The Prognosis:

A technically sleek yet curiously empty thriller. Other watches its heroine fall apart but forgets to make us care what she finds in the end.

  • Saul Muerte