Category Archives: retrospective

Frozen Ambitions and Soulless Returns: Revisiting Wes Craven’s Chiller (1985)

21 Wednesday May 2025

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Four decades on, Craven’s made-for-TV sci-fi horror remains a flawed but fascinating blend of cryogenics, corporate greed, and cautionary terror.

By 1985, Wes Craven was still deep in the throes of building his horror legacy. Having just reshaped nightmares with A Nightmare on Elm Street, Craven pivoted into made-for-TV territory with Chiller, a cautionary tale that tiptoes into sci-fi horror. While it never reaches the stylistic or thematic potency of his best work, Chiller remains a curiosity worth revisiting—particularly on its 40th anniversary—for its oddball blend of futuristic fears and Reagan-era yuppie dread.

The premise is chilling in theory: a wealthy industrialist, Miles Creighton (Michael Beck), is cryogenically frozen following his death, only to be reanimated a decade later. But something essential is missing. His soul, it seems, didn’t make the journey back. What follows is a slow-burning descent into sociopathic cruelty as Miles—emotionless and spiritually hollow—reclaims his corporate empire with cold precision and increasingly inhuman behaviour.

Craven attempts to explore the intersection of science and morality, a theme that’s ahead of its time, especially with its allusions to cryogenics and post-death technology. Yet the execution often feels flat. The pace plods, the scares are minimal, and the dialogue teeters on the melodramatic. Still, beneath its TV-movie trappings, there’s a sinister subtext bubbling away—one that critiques 1980s capitalist hubris, the soulless nature of corporate power, and the terrifying idea that a man without a conscience might thrive in a world that rewards ambition over empathy.

There’s also a surprising thread of subtle, almost darkly comic undertones as Miles navigates the modern world with ice-cold detachment. Craven flirts with irony here, but never fully commits—leaving the film in tonal limbo.

While Chiller is far from essential Craven, its place in his filmography offers insight into the director’s restlessness and willingness to experiment, even on the small screen. For a deeper dissection of the film’s flaws and hidden charms, the Surgeons of Horror podcast delivers a thoughtful and entertaining autopsy, peeling back the layers of what could have been a more potent moral thriller.

The Prognosis:

Chiller serves less as a forgotten gem and more as a time capsule—one that freezes a moment in Craven’s career when he was still probing the boundaries of fear and consequence, even if the results didn’t fully thaw into form.

  • 40th anniversary retrospective by Saul Muerte

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed: Hammer’s Bleak Descent into Moral Horror

16 Friday May 2025

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Peter Cushing delivers his darkest turn as Baron Frankenstein in Terence Fisher’s brutal, uncompromising portrait of ambition unmoored from humanity.

Few characters in horror history have undergone as grim an evolution as Hammer Films’ Baron Victor Frankenstein. By 1969, the once-charming and impassioned scientist had metamorphosed into something altogether colder, crueller — and never more so than in Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed. Marking one of the studio’s boldest and bleakest entries, Terence Fisher’s film plunges audiences into a chilling moral abyss, anchored by Peter Cushing’s most malevolent portrayal of the Baron.

From the outset, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed is suffused with an atmosphere of stark brutality. Gone is the romanticised ambition of earlier installments; in its place stands a portrait of Frankenstein as a calculating sociopath, concerned only with his own vindication. Peter Cushing, always a master of understated menace, turns in a performance of extraordinary steeliness — chillingly urbane one moment, terrifyingly ruthless the next. His Baron is a man for whom human life is but clay to be shaped, discarded, or destroyed in pursuit of scientific triumph.

Fisher, who had been instrumental in defining Hammer’s gothic aesthetic, embraces a far colder visual palette here. The film trades ornate castles and vibrant colors for stark, drained settings — a reflection of Frankenstein’s spiritual desolation. Even the violence feels less operatic and more intimately brutal, culminating in moments that strip the mythos of any lingering romanticism.

Central to the film’s enduring controversy is the much-discussed scene in which Frankenstein rapes Anna (Veronica Carlson) — a moment absent from the original script and forced upon the production by studio pressure. Both Cushing and Carlson vehemently opposed the inclusion, and their disapproval seeps into the scene’s palpable discomfort. While ethically troubling, the moment undeniably darkens the character beyond redemption, underscoring the film’s unflinching portrayal of moral collapse. It transforms Frankenstein from a misguided idealist into a full-fledged predator — a monster not of nature, but of willful cruelty.

Carlson and Simon Ward, portraying the beleaguered couple ensnared in Frankenstein’s machinations, deliver affecting performances that heighten the tragedy. Carlson, in particular, lends a dignified pathos to a role burdened by the demands of a narrative far more nihilistic than Hammer’s previous outings.

Freddie Jones, in his first major film role as the tragic Professor Brandt, is a revelation. His performance captures both the physical fragility and the mental anguish of a man resurrected against his will, trapped within a stolen body and a crumbling mind. Jones infuses Brandt with a quiet dignity and simmering rage, crafting a character whose humanity serves as a stark rebuke to Frankenstein’s inhumanity. His confrontation with Cushing in the film’s final act offers a rare glimmer of emotional depth amid the relentless bleakness, elevating the story beyond pure gothic horror into something far more sorrowful and profound.

Thematically, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed confronts the corrosion of empathy under the guise of scientific pursuit. It suggests that evil need not spring from grandiose ambitions but from the erosion of everyday decency. Frankenstein’s destruction of lives — not in moments of passion, but through cold, bureaucratic calculation — offers a horror far more enduring than any stitched-together monster.

The Prognosis:

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed stands as a stark outlier within the Hammer canon — a film willing to fully reckon with the darkness its iconic character had always flirted with. Though marred by studio-imposed controversy, it remains a harrowing, essential entry in the Frankenstein cycle — a reminder that sometimes the true monster wears the most respectable face.

  • 1960s retrospective review by Saul Muerte

A Melting Dream: Nightmare in Wax and the Lurid Echoes of Late ’60s Horror

10 Saturday May 2025

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Cameron Mitchell shines amid the decay of a flawed but fascinating low-budget oddity.

By the tail end of the 1960s, horror cinema found itself at a strange crossroads — straddling the last gasps of gothic grandeur while cautiously eyeing the burgeoning grit of a new era. Bud Townsend’s Nightmare in Wax (1969) sits awkwardly between these two worlds, offering a sordid yet visually intriguing piece that, for all its flashes of style, ultimately crumbles under the weight of its own limitations.

At its core, Nightmare in Wax is a lurid revenge tale. Cameron Mitchell — always a reliable hand in low-budget horror — lends the film its most convincing element, embodying Vince Renaud, a once-celebrated actor whose face has been horribly disfigured in a freak accident. Swallowed by bitterness and madness, Renaud retreats into the uncanny embrace of a wax museum, where his obsession with preserving beauty takes on an insidious literalness. Mitchell throws himself into the role with a bruised intensity, managing to elevate dialogue that, in lesser hands, would have collapsed into pure melodrama. His performance is a reminder that even within the most wayward productions, a committed actor can carve out something worth watching.

Visually, Nightmare in Wax occasionally brushes against something far more interesting than its narrative suggests. The cinematography, while often rudimentary, occasionally slips into unexpected pockets of stylisation. The flickering, chiaroscuro lighting of the wax museum sequences conjures a greasy, dreamlike atmosphere — a kind of sun-bleached noir sensibility that suggests a more ambitious film trapped inside the one we actually received. Shots linger just a touch too long on the deformed figures and melted visages, a grotesque fascination that, when paired with the film’s threadbare budget, achieves an uncanny, unsettling texture.

However, these moments are fleeting. The broader construction of Nightmare in Wax is messy and unfocused, with a meandering pace that undercuts its own tension. What might have been an incisive study of madness and celebrity decay is instead rendered clumsy by stilted secondary performances, ham-fisted exposition, and an aesthetic that lurches uneasily between pulp thriller and camp horror. Even the gruesome set-pieces, while conceptually fascinating, lack the polish and menace needed to make them truly memorable.

There is, to be fair, a certain tawdry charm in the film’s audacity — its waxen tableaux of frozen horror and its feverish, sun-drenched grotesquerie — but these alone cannot rescue Nightmare in Wax from its fundamental shortcomings. It remains a curious artifact: a film not without merit, but one whose flashes of inspiration are too isolated to coalesce into something enduring.

The Prognosis:

For those willing to sift through the wreckage, Cameron Mitchell’s performance and the occasional visual flourish offer a glimpse into the strange, transitional state of late-1960s horror. It’s a nightmare, yes — but one that flickers, briefly, with the strange, melting beauty of a dying dream.

  • 1960s Retrospective review by Saul Muerte

Ice Cream Man (1995): A Cold Treat That’s Long Since Soured

08 Thursday May 2025

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Chilled to Imperfection: Three decades on, Ice Cream Man remains a sticky splatter of missed opportunities and cult oddities.

By 1995, horror had begun to lean into its self-awareness, but Ice Cream Man, directed by Norman Apstein, wasn’t quite in on the joke—or if it was, it delivered its punchlines with a busted scooper.

Set in a seemingly idyllic suburb where childhood innocence melts into madness, the film stars Clint Howard as Gregory Tudor, a traumatised boy turned deranged adult who inherits an ice cream truck… and uses it to serve up frozen desserts laced with severed fingers, eyeballs, and worse. It’s a premise ripe for absurd horror-comedy gold—but what we get is a lumpy mess of gore, uneven pacing, and tonal whiplash.

There’s a certain offbeat charm to Ice Cream Man, thanks largely to Clint Howard’s twitchy, off-kilter performance. He leans into Gregory’s tragic backstory with a kind of unhinged commitment that almost makes you feel for him—almost. But even Howard’s peculiar screen presence can’t save a film that struggles to balance grotesque horror and campy fun. It often veers too far in either direction and ends up stranded in a sticky, blood-stained middle ground.

The film’s greatest crime isn’t the body parts buried in sundaes—it’s the wasted potential. There’s an entire subplot involving a gang of precocious kids playing junior detectives, seemingly lifted from a Spielbergian playbook, but with none of the polish. Their interactions often feel like a rough draft of The Monster Squad, minus the cohesion or chemistry. And while the kills are creatively grotesque, the direction and editing drain them of impact.

Still, Ice Cream Man has nestled itself in cult corners for its sheer oddity. It’s one of those late-night cable curiosities—the kind of movie you stumble upon half-awake, unsure if it was real or a fever dream. There’s a cheap, backyard-horror spirit to it that some might affectionately admire, especially with its practical effects and lo-fi aesthetic. But admiration doesn’t equal success.

The Prognosis:

Three decades later, Ice Cream Man remains a curious artifact of mid-90s direct-to-video horror—part slasher, part black comedy, part botched parody. It never manages to be scary, funny, or compelling, but there’s something to be said for its persistence. Like freezer-burnt leftovers, it’s still there… but only the brave or nostalgic should dare a second bite.

  • 30th Anniversary Retrospective by Saul Muerte

Creature (1985): A Pale Echo from Saturn’s Shadows

07 Wednesday May 2025

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An icy moon, a forgotten monster, and a film still trapped in the shadow of its predecessors.

By 1985, the cinematic trail left by Alien had already spawned a legion of imitators, each trying to harness the same claustrophobic dread in cold, inhuman spaces. Creature, directed by William Malone, was one of those echoing attempts—big on promise, but undermined by budgetary constraints, pacing issues, and a story that always feels like it’s playing catch-up with better films.

Set on Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, the film follows a team of American explorers who stumble upon an ancient alien lifeform… one that’s been resting, quite undisturbed, for about 200,000 years—until now. But instead of unfurling as a fresh nightmare in the vein of Ridley Scott or John Carpenter, Creature quickly shows its hand as an awkward patchwork of sci-fi horror tropes, leaning on atmosphere it can’t fully conjure and characters we barely come to know.

The film does score points for its setting: the barren, icy terrain of Titan is a fitting stage for isolation and cosmic dread. There are moments—fleeting though they may be—where you can feel the weight of that space, the crushing silence, the desperate last gasps of human life under alien pressure. But these moments rarely evolve into anything more than background mood. The tension is never sustained.

Much of Creature’s legacy has survived in cult circles, owing partly to its practical effects and its modest but ambitious creature design, which—when shown sparingly—can deliver a jolt or two. Yet the creature itself, supposedly the film’s main draw, feels underutilised and poorly revealed. The mystery dies the moment we see too much, too soon. It’s less terrifying predator and more sluggish, rubbery reminder of what could have been.

Performances are serviceable, but thinly sketched. Klaus Kinski shows up as a wild card—naturally—but even his brand of manic energy can’t elevate a script that barely holds together under scrutiny. His presence, like the alien, feels like something stitched in for effect rather than organically grown from the narrative.

What Creature most sorely lacks is identity. It wants to be Alien, it wants to be The Thing, and it even wants to nod at Cold War paranoia with its American and German tensions, but never manages to settle into a rhythm of its own. The result is a film that feels more like a VHS relic than a true lost classic—better suited to playing in the background of a late-night sci-fi marathon than being revisited for serious chills.

That said, there’s still a strange charm to it all. The film is a product of its time—ambitious in scope, restricted in execution, and clearly crafted by filmmakers who loved the genre. William Malone would go on to prove himself more confidently in later works like House on Haunted Hill (1999), but here, he was still wading through derivative waters.

The Prognosis:

Forty years on, Creature remains a faint star in the vast constellation of 80s horror sci-fi. Not quite forgotten, not quite worth remembering—it lingers, orbiting obscurity, its promise still sleeping beneath the ice.

  • 40th Anniversary Retrospective by Saul Muerte

Ink, Flesh, and Fire: Teruo Ishii’s Inferno of Torture (1969)

03 Saturday May 2025

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A feverish plunge into Edo-era exploitation, where the beauty of art is carved from the cruelty of flesh.

By the late 1960s, Japanese director Teruo Ishii had cemented his reputation as a provocateur—an auteur of the abnormal whose films constantly tested the limits of good taste. Following the surreal sadism of his Joys of Torture series and the florid transgressions of Orgies of Edo, Ishii would return once more to the nexus of eroticism and agony with Inferno of Torture (徳川いれずみ師：責め地獄). Released in 1969, this film marked yet another swirling descent into the baroque horrors of Japan’s past, tinged with the obsessions of modern exploitation cinema.

Set during the Tokugawa era, Inferno of Torture builds its narrative around the booming trade of tattooed geisha—women whose bodies are transformed into canvases to satisfy the exotic desires of wealthy Europeans. What begins as a lushly costumed tale of artisanship soon mutates into something darker and more sinister. The competition between two rival tattoo masters (each with their own brand of brutality and artistry) spirals into a portrait of obsession, commodification, and systemic cruelty, where the female form becomes both sacred and sacrificial.

Ishii’s camera lingers with equal reverence on the intricacies of traditional Japanese tattooing (irezumi) and the often shocking violence enacted to “preserve” or “perfect” these living artworks. His aesthetic is unmistakable: elaborate production design, garish colour palettes, and sudden, shocking cuts that blur the boundary between the ceremonial and the obscene. Here, torture is not only spectacle—it’s also currency. Beauty is literally etched into pain.

While some of Ishii’s contemporaries were leaning into more psychological or supernatural horror, Inferno of Torture embraced the physical and the performative. The film sits on a precarious edge, asking the audience to reckon with the allure of suffering while never quite condemning its purveyors. It is this ambiguity—this refusal to clearly moralise—that makes the film both fascinating and uncomfortable. Is it an indictment of patriarchal cruelty, or an indulgence in it? Ishii leaves that question open, daring the viewer to look closer.

It’s important to view Inferno of Torture not as an isolated work, but as part of Ishii’s greater obsession with the grotesque pageantry of pain. Like his earlier Shogun’s Joy of Torture (1968), this film pulls from real historical punishments and court practices but filters them through a lens of stylised surrealism. Yet, where Shogun’s Joy was fragmented and episodic, Inferno is more narratively cohesive—anchored by the rivalry of the tattoo artists and the women who bear the consequences of their egos.

As noted in our prior discussion of Ishii’s legacy, the director had a unique ability to cloak exploitation in aesthetics. Inferno of Torture exemplifies this duality. It is a film of contradictions: gorgeous yet grotesque, meditative yet exploitative, artistic yet undeniably sleazy. Ishii revels in this tension, crafting a work that is less about resolution and more about confronting the audience with their own thresholds of taste.

Inferno of Torture remains a vivid example of the extremities that defined the tail-end of the 1960s in Japanese genre cinema. It’s a challenging watch—not merely because of its brutality, but because of its beauty. That beauty, as Ishii reminds us again and again, comes at a price.

  • 1960s retrospective review by Saul Muerte

Wax Works: Two Decades On, This Remake Still Doesn’t Stick

29 Tuesday Apr 2025

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Jaume Collet-Serra’s glossy 2005 slasher remake remains an empty vessel — preserved only by Paris Hilton’s headline-making death scene.

Time can be kind to horror. Cult classics rise from the ashes of critical scorn, reputations rehabilitate, and even the cheesiest slashers earn nostalgic affection. But House of Wax (2005), Jaume Collet-Serra’s glossy, grimy remake of the 1953 Vincent Price classic (itself a remake), remains stubbornly embalmed in mediocrity.

Released in the mid-2000s horror boom — where slick aesthetics and disposable casts were the norm — House of Wax offered little beyond surface-level thrills. A group of attractive, personality-deficient teens become stranded near a creepy roadside attraction, only to discover the wax figures inside were once living people. What follows is a tired parade of genre clichés, vapid character development, and an overlong runtime that melts what little tension ever existed.

Most remember the film not for its suspense or horror, but for Paris Hilton’s much-hyped on-screen death — a moment so cynically marketed that it became the film’s entire selling point. Ironically, Hilton ends up being one of the more memorable parts of the film, simply by virtue of being a cultural lightning rod. The rest of the cast — including a pre-Supernatural Jared Padalecki and Elisha Cuthbert — do what they can with a script that barely gives them anything to work with.

To Collet-Serra’s credit, the production design is occasionally striking. The titular house of wax itself is grotesquely fascinating, and there’s a certain warped artistry in the film’s finale, as it literally burns and collapses around the surviving characters. But by then, it’s too late — the film has already drowned in a pool of derivative ideas, manufactured edge, and PG-13 posturing disguised as R-rated grit.

The Prognosis:

Two decades on, House of Wax isn’t exactly worth scraping from the bottom of the wax vat. It’s not so-bad-it’s-good, nor is it completely unwatchable — just forgettable, slickly packaged horror that’s all sheen and no soul.

  • Saul Muerte

Dead Eyes and Dim Hopes: 30 Years of John Carpenter’s Village of the Damned

27 Sunday Apr 2025

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This cold, contract-bound remake fails to capture the chilling essence of its source — but still boasts moments of eerie charm and unexpected star power.

When Village of the Damned landed in cinemas in 1995, it was already staring down the impossible — updating a revered British sci-fi horror tale (The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham) and stepping into the shoes of the eerie, monochrome classic from 1960. And despite the might of genre legend John Carpenter behind the camera, the result was a forgettable misfire, marked by studio compromise and artistic disinterest.

The story still carries a chilling premise: a mysterious force knocks out a coastal town in California, and shortly afterward, every woman of childbearing age turns up pregnant. The children born from this strange phenomenon are pale, intelligent, and utterly devoid of empathy. It’s fertile ground for psychological horror and social allegory — but this version mostly settles for surface-level spooks and some unfortunately lifeless storytelling.

Christopher Reeve (in what would be his final film role before his tragic accident) brings dignity and gravitas as the town’s conflicted doctor, while Mark Hamill, in an uncharacteristically stern role, plays the local reverend. Seeing Superman and Luke Skywalker in the same frame offers a brief thrill for fans, but even their presence can’t overcome the flat tone and narrative inertia. Lindsay Haun as Mara, the children’s chilling leader, is one of the few bright spots — channeling icy menace with a gaze that deserves better framing.

Carpenter himself later admitted that Village of the Damned was a contractual obligation — and it shows. Absent is the spark of passion or innovation that shaped his earlier masterpieces. Even the usually standout Carpenter score feels half-hearted, composed in collaboration with Dave Davies of The Kinks but largely forgettable. What little levity the film does offer comes in moments of unintentional humour or scenery-chewing camp, rather than any clever writing.

And yet, there’s something strangely watchable about it. Maybe it’s the morbid curiosity of watching a great filmmaker go through the motions, or the way the story’s unnerving core still peeks through the cracks — a disturbing parable about control, conformity, and fear of the unknown. But in the end, this Village feels more like a ghost town.

  • Saul Muerte

Whispers in The Mad Room: A Slow-Burning Descent into Familial Fear

26 Saturday Apr 2025

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This under-the-radar 1969 thriller simmers with quiet dread and strong performances, even if it never fully embraces its madness.

In the shadow of better-known psychological thrillers of the 1960s, Bernard Girard’s The Mad Room sits in a strange limbo — a Gothic-tinged chamber piece that doesn’t quite unravel as boldly as its premise promises, but nonetheless simmers with intrigue, dread, and the occasional jolt of melodramatic madness.

A reimagining of Ladies in Retirement (1941), the film casts a young Stella Stevens as Ellen Hardy, whose attempt to build a respectable life is threatened by the sudden return of her institutionalised siblings. With a wedding on the horizon and a matriarchal employer (a scene-stealing Shelley Winters) to appease, Ellen’s composure begins to unravel as past horrors threaten to bleed into the present — culminating in a suspicious death and an ever-darkening sense of claustrophobia.

While The Mad Room never fully descends into the psychological chaos it flirts with, it crafts a tense atmosphere within the confines of its limited setting. Girard’s direction is largely restrained, letting the performances do most of the heavy lifting, particularly Stevens, whose nervous energy gives the film a pulse even when the pacing sags.

However, despite its sinister setup and a few genuinely unsettling moments, the film doesn’t push far enough. Its secrets are telegraphed too early, and the final revelations feel like a missed opportunity to truly shock. The film lingers just on the edge of greatness, unwilling to let itself go mad.

The Prognosis:

For fans of slow-burning, character-driven thrillers with a taste for domestic unease and lingering trauma, The Mad Room offers a slightly underappreciated detour into late-60s psychological horror — flawed, yes, but not without merit.

  • Saul Muerte

Cherry Falls Trips Over Its Own Premise

24 Thursday Apr 2025

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A provocative twist on slasher tropes can’t save this Scream-inspired misfire, despite strong turns from Brittany Murphy and Michael Biehn.

Cherry Falls arrives on the heels of the late ’90s slasher revival, clearly aiming to ride the wave created by Wes Craven’s Scream, but instead crashes headfirst into its own uneven tone and underwhelming execution. Released in 2000, Geoffrey Wright’s high-concept horror flick flips the slasher trope on its head — targeting virgins rather than the sexually active — yet it ultimately lacks the finesse or wit to carry its premise beyond surface-level shock.

The film is buoyed, in part, by the late Brittany Murphy’s off-kilter, captivating presence as Jody Marken. Her performance injects the film with some much-needed emotional depth and unpredictability. Alongside her, Michael Biehn brings a grounded seriousness as the town sheriff, delivering a performance that feels like it belongs to a more sophisticated script.

However, despite its intriguing central idea and flashes of satirical promise, Cherry Falls struggles with identity — caught between wanting to parody slasher tropes and simultaneously embracing them without the cleverness that made Scream a genre-defining success. Its tonal inconsistency makes it feel more like a pale imitator than a bold reinvention.

By the time the third act rolls around, the film loses what little momentum it had. A rushed and weak resolution undercuts any tension or investment, leaving viewers with more questions than satisfaction. It’s a finale that feels as though the filmmakers ran out of time — or worse, ideas.

The Prognosis:

Cherry Falls is a curious relic of post-Scream horror, notable more for its cast than its execution. Brittany Murphy’s performance remains its most memorable asset, a haunting reminder of a talent taken too soon. But beyond that, the film fails to leave much of a lasting impression.

  • Saul Muerte