Eight films in, and the V/H/S franchise has reached that strange liminal space between reinvention and redundancy. V/H/S/Halloween promises another grab bag of analog nightmares, but what it ultimately offers is a reminder that this format — and perhaps found footage itself — is struggling to justify its continued revival.
Segmented through Bryan M. Ferguson’s Diet Phantasma, a frame narrative about a possessed soft drink, the film pulses between absurdist body horror and tongue-in-cheek satire. It’s gory, chaotic, and knowingly silly — a kind of VHS-era Cronenberg-lite filtered through Slimehouse aesthetics. It’s amusing enough, but its placement between each short becomes little more than a sugar rush: a filler designed to jolt, not haunt.
Anna Zlokovic’s Coochie Coochie Coo aims for Barbarian-esque weirdness but collapses under its own shaky-cam chaos. It’s conceptually interesting — exploring the monstrous side of motherhood and lost innocence — yet the execution feels forced, desperate to shock rather than unsettle.
Paco Plaza’s Ut Supra Sic Infra is easily the standout. The [REC] director flexes his mastery of dread with a metaphysical descent into ritual horror and the supernatural. It’s slick, moody, and genuinely disorienting, proving that when the right filmmaker takes the reins, the V/H/S anthology format can still bite.
Casper Kelly’s Fun Size, however, is a regression — an infantile splatter piece that mistakes noise for novelty. Whether its deliberately bad performances are meant to parody ‘80s horror cheese or are just poorly handled is anyone’s guess, but it grates either way.
Alex Ross Perry’s Kidprint ends things on a troubling note, tackling child abduction and snuff imagery with an uneasy hand. The idea — a man unwittingly complicit in a ring of video-taped killings — could have been chilling, but the tone wobbles between exploitative and hollow. It’s a grim finish that leaves you numb rather than disturbed.
And that’s the core issue here: V/H/S/Halloween feels like it’s circling the drain of its own nostalgia. The analog grime, the static, the jittery cuts — once the aesthetic of underground menace — now play like ritualised pastiche. There are sparks of invention, but they’re buried under too many loud edits and too few genuine scares.
The Prognosis:
Maybe it’s time to admit what’s been lurking behind the flicker for years: the found footage format — once raw, immediate, and terrifying — is finally running out of tape.
Kris Collins’ House on Eden feels like a film caught between admiration and imitation. On one hand, there’s a clear love for the stripped-down mechanics of low-budget horror — a small cast, a single creepy location, a reliance on atmosphere over spectacle. On the other, its DNA is so heavily indebted to The Blair Witch Project that it struggles to escape that long shadow, never quite finding its own voice in a subgenre that has already been mined for all it’s worth.
The setup is textbook found footage: paranormal investigators Kris, Celina, and their videographer Jay stumble into an abandoned house in the woods, where unsettling sounds, missing crew members, and unnerving presences steadily erode their sanity. To Collins’ credit, the film knows how to milk tension out of a flickering flashlight and a half-glimpsed shadow. There’s a genuine appreciation for the lo-fi aesthetic, which at times gives the film a scrappy, grassroots charm.
But charm isn’t enough when the beats feel so familiar. Every missing person, every static-laden frame, every anguished scream into the darkness calls back to 1999 — but without the raw novelty or cultural punch that made Blair Witch revolutionary. Instead of reinventing the formula, House on Eden seems content to echo it, and in doing so highlights just how stale the found footage format can feel in 2025.
The biggest frustration is that there are hints of potential. The lore surrounding the house suggests something ancient and malevolent, but the film barely scratches at it before retreating into shaky cam hysteria. A stronger commitment to its own mythology might have given it some distinction. Instead, what lingers is the sense of a genre on its last legs — a reminder that what once felt like the future of horror may finally be ready for burial.
The Prognosis:
House on Eden isn’t unwatchable, and diehard found footage fans may appreciate its sincerity. But for most, it lands as a pale reflection of a classic, underscoring that sometimes the scariest thing a horror movie can show us is that the format itself might be dead.
Sometimes when we get caught up reviewing all these films, it’s easy – all too easy – to forget that as with a painter staring at a blank canvas; a director, when given their brief, is staring at a multitude of choices in which to tell the story they have written (or in the case of The Long Walk; been given) . And this particular story is the brainchild of writing grand master Stephen King. So, no presh. Also throw in the fact that it involves walking, a ton of it, and you might think this is a film for a novice (too inexperienced to know that this is an extremely tough assignment) or a black belt filmmaker. Someone who knows enough to know that a movie that’s about walking in the open air gives you nowhere to go. No immediate cutaways, no car chases, no love scenes to dictate changes in pace etc. Heck even your coverage choices are limited by how stylised (or not) you want to go about filming men walking. And walking. And walking. So what do you do? Well, there are a few things this pic leans on, and we’ll talk about those in a bit. But first – some much-needed context for the 0.08% of you who have clicked on this article not knowing what this movie is about. Set in a dystopian alternative reality (around 1970’s ish – although the exact time period is never stated, so I’m going off the novel, which was written in 1979) you soon realise that The Hunger Games (and King’s own The Running Man) owe a lot to this idea. Which is, you get people to WILLINGLY go through a trial of fire to get some nebulous sense of financial freedom, and freedom from bondage. In this particular case, you walk. As in you collate at a starting line, get assigned a number and you walk. There is no finish line. Last man standing (and it is all men in this story. Young men, one from each State of the U.S. – so 50 in total) wins. And wins big. Both in terms of $ and a wish… The rule is you DO NOT stop. Evah. If you do for more than a few seconds you are given a warning. If you fall below 3 miles an hour you are given a warning. More than 3 warnings in an hour and you are executed there and then by one of the volley of military personnel keeping pace with you. Water and rudimentary rations are given to the walkers, which prolongs their agony if anything. Because stopping to relieve yourself or sleeping is counted as a warning/shootable offence. Taking a pebble out of your shoe, bad weather, incredibly steep inclines…. you’d be surprised just how many things can impede a good walk when halting is not an option. And that’s what this review will do right now to get the always insightful Chris Dawes to give his take on the movie. Over to you Chris!
Ok. So. In my view there are two types of Stephen King adaptations – The genre defining classic (The Shining, Green Mile, Shawshank) and Dreamcatcher.
The Long Walk is the former. It’s incredible – they have managed to make a minimalist, mid budget film about a bunch of people walking through middle America deeply engaging. Even the moments that you can see coming hit you, and hit you hard. Everyone in this film is acting the shit out of it in the best possible way – I reckon this will be the breakout movie for a bunch of the next generations’ Oscar winners. It’s the kind of film that sits with you when it is over. And boy howdy, do I love a Mark Hamill heel turn – I genuinely hated his character in a way I have not often hated a film bad guy. Fucker managed to out-Darth Darth. Glorious. No notes. See this movie.
So, as you can see – mixed emotions from Chris there. I kid. As he touched upon, the best weapon this movie had at its disposal was casting. One way to get around a story that has limitations in terms of setting is to make sure your actors are world class for the roles they have been chosen to play. And for this trek, the filmmakers have nailed it. When all you have is dialogue interspersed with ratcheting tension with each death, it helps that the baseline words come from Stephen King. But when those words are delivered by young actors who themselves are clearly gifted craftsmen, then you have the luxury of letting this movie do all the heavy lifting for you. And the tone from the outset is thrown down by the only real female member of the cast – Judy Greer. Now well and truly in the mother character phase of her career, her heartbreak as she bids farewell to her son at the starting line hits a perfect balance. Not over-wrought to put you off the film before it’s even started, but 100% grounded in a reality you can buy into. Because at this point of the movie you don’t know the rules of The Walk, but in a great example of show don’t tell, you know it can’t be good. So from the get-go you are intrigued and a little bit tense – the exact sort of tone you want at the start of a flick like this. So. Writing and acting. That’s how you make a dangerously simple premise work. [Allow time for the world’s biggest d’uh]. But another thing that played in favour of this film was its unapologetic refusal to look away. The way these men die is graphic, and that’s the point. A bullet does horrendous damage to a human body. Powered metal explodes through bone and tissue and it doesn’t care how you look when it does, and this film makes sure you SEE that, in all its factually visceral detail.
And it’s not gratuitous either. But rather, the point. Because why would these men sign up for something that has a 49 in 50 chance of killing you in a physically painful and undignified way? Well – why would 12 districts send 2 young people each year to fight to the death for the amusement of the rich masses? And by extension… why would SO MANY people in a real-life election vote AGAINST their own best interest? Because the illusion those in power sell to those without is tantalising and intoxicating. It’s framed in rules that THEY set, but if you play the game, you can be ONE OF THEM. One of US! In this case, chances are 49 to 50 against, but the result is binary. It’s either yes, or it’s no. And most of us think and feel – deep down – we are the lead character of our own story. And rules don’t apply to lead characters! Lead characters stand out by going against the mainstream and beating the odds. Lead characters are special and so are YOU! Despite something immutable as math saying you’re not. Plus changing an unfair status quo through revolution seems like a lot of hard work. Work that mostly benefits those who come after you, as revolts usually kill a lot of instigators. Even successful ones. So why not choose a path that could immediately benefit YOU instead? Countless money AND a wish? So what if the odds are not in favour? If you want anything in life, anything that’s worth it, you gotta work for it. Bleed for it. Walk for it. Die for it.
The Prognosis:
Power is an illusion, but it doesn’t make it not real. And this film makes you feel that every step of the way. 5 stars.
Brandon Christensen’s Night of the Reaper wears its genre lineage proudly, a film whose scaffolding is unmistakably indebted to the slasher cycle of the late 1970s and early ’80s. Yet what distinguishes it from mere pastiche is Christensen’s attempt to infuse the familiar architecture of suburban dread with a contemporary reflexivity. The result is a work that gestures toward both homage and reinvention, though it occasionally falters under the weight of its own ambition.
At its core, the narrative is bifurcated: Deena, a college student reluctantly drawn into the liminal domestic space of babysitting, embodies the archetypal “final girl,” while the sheriff’s scavenger-hunt pursuit of a killer injects a procedural dimension that broadens the scope beyond the living-room crucible. This duality lends the film a structural intrigue, complicating the linear inevitability characteristic of earlier slashers. Christensen’s gambit is to stretch the genre’s grammar toward a more fragmented, almost puzzle-box form, and while not always seamless, it sustains an atmosphere of unease.
Thematically, Night of the Reaper interrogates surveillance, communication, and the transmission of violence—whether through mailed evidence or the uncanny ritual of watching over another’s child. The “babysitter” trope here functions less as a mere setup than as a cultural cipher: the guardian of innocence, rendered vulnerable not only by external threat but by the epistemic instability of what she sees, hears, and knows.
Performances, particularly from Clement, anchor the film in an emotional realism that offsets its occasional excesses of plotting. If the twists sometimes feel calibrated for shock rather than inevitability, they nonetheless affirm Christensen’s willingness to deny the audience easy comfort. The film’s refusal to collapse into nostalgia, even while nodding to Carpenter and Craven, positions it as both homage and critique.
The Prognosis:
Night of the Reaper is less about transcending the slasher than about testing its elasticity—stretching a well-worn form to see what new resonances might emerge. Christensen may reach a little too high, but in doing so he ensures that the film, like its protagonists, never entirely succumbs to the shadow of its predecessors.
Saul Muerte
Night of the Reaper is streaming on Shudder from Friday 19th Sept
There’s a line I keep coming back to when watching The Conjuring: Last Rites: “The case that ended it all.” Not just for Ed and Lorraine Warren, whose final chapter this is meant to be, but for the sprawling universe their names have conjured into existence. Like every haunting, it’s less about the cold spots and whispers in the dark than it is about the people who believed enough to chase them. And at the heart of all this chasing, for over a decade now, have been Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga.
If the devil lives in the details, then the soul of this franchise lives in their eyes. Wilson’s steady but haunted Ed, Farmiga’s luminous and fierce Lorraine—they’ve carried us through nun sightings, cursed dolls, crooked men, and endless houses rattling at 3 a.m. What’s remarkable is not that they convinced us to be afraid, but that they convinced us to believe in love. Their bond has been the true connective tissue of the Conjuring Universe, more powerful than holy water or a crucifix.
Michael Chaves, who has already carved his name into the annals of this cinematic scripture (The Curse of La Llorona, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, The Nun II), is tasked with the ultimate rite: closing the circle. He doesn’t swing for jump-scares or gore this time. Instead, he stages something quieter, almost tender. Yes, there are entities in shadowy corners, and the Warrens must confront forces that seem beyond human comprehension. But the real confrontation is with time, mortality, and the question of what we leave behind.
Watching Last Rites feels less like entering a haunted house and more like attending a vigil. Each scene reminds us that the Conjuring films were never really about demons—it was about the Warrens looking into the abyss together, hand in hand. And while the scares are muted, the harmony between Wilson and Farmiga remains intact, their chemistry now weathered but stronger, a testament to why audiences kept returning long after the first clap in the dark.
For longtime followers, this is less exorcism and more benediction. Chaves doesn’t so much slam the door shut as pass the candlelight forward. Whether the torch will ignite future stories in this universe, or flicker out with a final prayer, remains unknown. But there’s a sense of closure—like the last page of a well-worn case file, annotated not just with facts and evidence, but with love letters written in the margins.
The Prognosis:
If you came looking for terror, you may leave unsatisfied. But if you came looking for a farewell—an elegy for the haunted hearts who dared to investigate the impossible—then The Conjuring: Last Rites offers exactly that. A requiem, not for the dead, but for a love that kept the darkness at bay.
The shadows are calling again. The screen is no longer a safe window to peer through but a chasm, hungry and alive, waiting to swallow you whole. Strap in, Sydney — Dark Nights Film Fest Vol. 2 has crawled out of the grave and into the Ritz, and this time it’s not here to play nice.
This isn’t cinema for the faint, the casual, or the polite. This is cinema that stalks you through the back alleys of your subconscious, cinema that rips the floorboards off your cozy illusions and drags you headfirst into a pit of worms. Just when you thought the blood had dried and the screams had faded, festival director Bryn Tilly has cranked open the gates again, ushering in a delirious parade of maniacs, monsters, and midnight visions.
Nine Australian premieres. One unholy cult resurrection. Twenty-two short, sharp shocks from across the globe. It’s a full-course banquet of nightmares, each dish steaming with dread and dripping with the strange juices of cinema’s dark heart.
Opening night doesn’t just raise a curtain — it tears open the roof with Hell House LLC: Lineage, an unhinged carnival of terror where haunted basements and clown-faced demons set the tone for what’s to come: fear without safety nets. From there the fest descends into Germany’s tangled woods with Bark, drags you through the neon purgatory of America in A Desert, and burns you alive with the Serbian one-two punch of A Serbian Documentary and Karmadonna — films that don’t just push buttons, they rip them out and swallow them whole.
But the crown jewel of delirium? Peter Jackson’s Braindead in screaming 4K glory. Thirty years since its last Australian theatrical run, and the pus-filled carnage hasn’t aged a day. This isn’t a screening — it’s an exorcism of sanity, an orgy of undead slapstick that makes every Marvel movie look like a children’s nap-time.
And just when your skull’s about to split, along comes Necromorphosis, burrowing into your flesh like a cockroach in heat, and Sun, a fever-dream hybrid of movement and madness that dances straight into the abyss. By the time the anthology Adorable Humans rolls around, Hans Christian Andersen will be spinning in his grave fast enough to power a small Danish village.
Closing night locks the doors and swallows the keys with The School Duel, a dystopian grenade lobbed at society’s fragile bones — ferocious, timely, and cruelly relevant.
This isn’t just a festival. It’s a séance. A bacchanal of blood, dread, and midnight delirium. Between the Aussie and international shorts, the Movie Boutique of VHS relics and arcane treasures, and filmmakers dropping truth bombs about low-budget survival, Dark Nights is where the monsters come to play.
Forget safe cinema. Forget the plush multiplex glow. The Ritz is where the shadows come alive, and the screen bites back.
Dark Nights Film Fest Vol. 2 — October 9–12, Ritz Cinemas, Randwick. Bring your nerves, bring your nightmares, and leave your soul at the door.
When Zach Cregger entered the horror feature scene, he didn’t tiptoe — he detonated expectations. Barbarianwas less a debut than an ambush: a grimy, surprising, and brutally effective tale that revealed the monstrous rot beneath the airbrushed façade of Airbnb America. Its impact was seismic enough to place Cregger alongside names like Ari Aster and Jordan Peele — auteurs reshaping horror into the cultural mirror it was always meant to be. So when Weapons, his sophomore effort, sparked a bidding war (with Peele among the contenders), it was more than a surprise — it was a coronation in waiting.
Needless to say, Cregger won that war — and what he’s delivered is not Barbarian 2.0, but something stranger, more ambitious, and arguably more fractured. Weapons is a moody mosaic of trauma and silence, a sinister Rubik’s Cube where every rotation deepens the dread.
The premise? Devastatingly simple: seventeen children vanish in a single night from a third-grade classroom, leaving behind one silent survivor. From this incomprehensible event, the narrative spirals outward — or perhaps downward — following a grieving parent, a guilt-ridden teacher (Julia Garner in one of her finest, most haunted performances), a cop on the edge, and a child forever changed. But where other films would tighten their grip around whodunit logic, Weapons unspools into something looser, more hypnotic, and more unsettling.
Like Magnolia if directed by a sleep-deprived David Lynch with a grudge against PTA meetings, Weapons stitches together fractured timelines and parallel points of view. What emerges is not a thriller in any traditional sense, but a psychological pressure-cooker about grief, complicity, and the invisible rot hiding beneath the manicured lawns of America’s suburbs.
This underworld — literal and figurative — is fast becoming Cregger’s signature terrain. In Barbarian, it was the basement: that dread-soaked labyrinth of generational abuse buried beneath a “perfect” Detroit neighborhood. In Weapons, there is no single basement, but many — emotional caverns, buried truths, suburban crypts dressed as cul-de-sacs. The “what lies beneath” motif returns, only now it’s diffused across an entire town, each household its own cracked mask.
Cregger’s knack for dissonant tonal shifts — likely honed during his time with the absurdist comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U’ Know — is used here not just for comic relief, but as a narrative landmine. Just as you settle into one emotional register, he flips it: tragedy becomes absurdity, horror becomes farce, and laughter curdles into a scream. The comedy doesn’t soften the horror — it accentuates it, like a smile too wide on a corpse.
Though Weapons doesn’t carry the shocking immediacy of Barbarian, it proves Cregger isn’t a one-trick provocateur. He’s a filmmaker drawn to structure — and its collapse. He’s fascinated by what people repress, and what happens when that repression becomes radioactive. What makes this second feature particularly resonant is its willingness to linger, to disorient, and to drag its audience down into the darkness without the promise of catharsis.
Josh Brolin, as a grizzled, emotionally feral father, grounds the film with a gut-punch performance that crackles with grief and rage. And Garner’s turn as Justine Gandy — a character navigating guilt, authority, and maternal ambivalence — is quietly devastating. Their presence not only adds gravitas, but signals that Weapons is aiming beyond the horror niche. It wants to haunt, not just horrify.
Yes, Weapons will divide. It lacks the clean arc of a traditional mystery. It demands attention, patience, and a willingness to fall into its emotional sinkholes. But for those attuned to its wavelength, it’s a rewarding descent — a fever dream that lingers in the bones.
The Prognosis:
Cregger has once again shown that he isn’t just interested in jump scares or gore. He wants to excavate — to dig through the ruins of modern life and see what festers beneath. With Weapons, he’s pulled up something malformed, tragic, and oddly beautiful.
The question isn’t whether he’ll push boundaries in future films. It’s whether we’ll be ready for where he takes us next — or what lies buried when we get there.
Quarxx’s All the Gods in the Sky (Tous les dieux du ciel) is not easily categorised, and that’s entirely the point. Sitting somewhere between psychological horror, arthouse drama, and cosmic nightmare, this French genre-bender takes its time and isn’t afraid to make its audience uncomfortable—both emotionally and philosophically.
At the centre of this bruising tale is Simon, a deeply troubled factory worker played with quiet intensity by Jean-Luc Couchard. Isolated on a decaying farmhouse in the French countryside, Simon devotes his life to caring for his sister Estelle (Melanie Gaydos), who was left severely disabled due to a tragic accident during their childhood. The pair exist in a shared purgatory of guilt, silence, and unresolved trauma.
Quarxx delivers a slow punch of a film—one that creeps under your skin not with conventional jump scares, but with mood, decay, and despair. It builds its atmosphere with surgical precision, weaving in splinters of sci-fi, existential dread, and surrealism. Simon’s fixation with extraterrestrial salvation offers a disturbing mirror into his desperation—a hope that something beyond this earth might rescue them from their irreversible reality.
While not all of its experimental swings land perfectly, the film is bolstered by weighty performances and a haunting visual style. The bleak, moldy interiors and ghostly farm exterior evoke a tactile sense of rot, both physical and spiritual. Quarxx makes no effort to handhold the viewer, instead demanding that we wade through the same confusion and torment as Simon himself.
All the Gods in the Sky is certainly not a film for everyone. Its pacing is deliberate, its emotional resonance often brutal, and its genre elements veer from subtle to grotesque. But for those willing to embrace its unsettling tones, there’s something strangely transcendent at its core—a meditation on guilt, disability, and the yearning for escape, whether divine or alien.
The Prognosis:
Though it never fully ascends into the upper tier of arthouse horror, it remains a distinct and memorable piece—an otherworldly prayer whispered from the darkest corners of human suffering.
Saul Muerte
All The Gods in the Sky premieres on Shudder and AMC+ Monday 4 August
Trans horror’s fiercest voice returns with her most personal and spellbinding film yet
Australian filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay returns to the Fantasia International Film Festivalwith the Canadian premiere of her latest genre-defying feature, The Serpent’s Skin, screening July 23 and 25. Already hailed as her most emotionally resonant and stylistically bold film to date, The Serpent’s Skin fuses supernatural romance with visceral horror, balancing the grotesque and the intimate in true Mackay fashion.
With nods to The Craft, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Charmed, Mackay’s newest film conjures millennial teen nostalgia while grounding its witchy terror in the urgent realities of Gen-Z identity, trans survival, and queer resilience. The Serpent’s Skin follows Anna, a trans girl who escapes her stifling, bigoted hometown only to find both romance and horror in a new city—where she falls for goth tattoo artist Gen and accidentally unleashes a demon that begins feeding on their chosen family. What follows is a chilling exploration of trust, self-doubt, and love under supernatural pressure.
Mackay’s voice is unmistakable—raw, punk, defiantly queer—and in The Serpent’s Skin, she harnesses everything she’s learned across her rising career.
From her debut So Vam (2021), Mackay immediately caught the attention of the indie horror world. Described as “a perfect metaphor for transitions and change” and “crafted with a learned voice,” the film positioned Mackay as a filmmaker to watch. Her follow-up, Bad Girl Boogey (2023), was no less impactful—“gritty and raw,” it revealed a sharpened focus and a stronger command of message-driven horror, showing that Mackay could “resonate” beyond just subculture circles.
With T-Blockers (2024), she made perhaps her most personal statement yet. Reviewers called it “fresh,” “unifying,” and “awakening,” applauding how Mackay used her own lived experience to channel communal anger and hope, all while clearly “having a ball” pushing genre boundaries. Her rapid creative output continued with Satranic Panic, another bold and timely entry praised for placing “real characters dealing with real issues in surreal circumstances.”
Produced by Dark Star Pictures, the company that has stood behind each of Mackay’s last five films, The Serpent’s Skin stars Alexandra McVicker (Vice Principals), Scott Major (Heartbreak High), Charlotte Chimes (Neighbours), and Jordan Dulieu (Before Dawn). It also features Fantasia alumni cameos from Avalon Fast (Honeycomb), Joe Lynch (Suitable Flesh), and Betsey Brown (Assholes), with Emmy-nominated Vera Drew (The People’s Joker) returning as editor and Louise Weard (Castration Movie) joining as producer.
Premiering earlier this year at Frameline and heading next to FrightFest this August, The Serpent’s Skin is more than just a new chapter in Mackay’s filmography—it’s a culmination of her growth as a director, writer, and creative force. She’s built a canon that pulses with identity, rage, humour, and style, always speaking directly to those who need it most.
As she returns to Fantasia—a festival that helped champion her earliest work—it’s clear Alice Maio Mackay is no longer just a promising talent. She’s a defining voice in trans cinema and genre storytelling. And with The Serpent’s Skin, she reminds us that transformation, no matter how painful, can be power.
The sequel we all knew was coming. And yes, we will be referring to our checklist of what makes a good sequel, but that aside, is this outing any good, and was it necessary?
From memory the last movie (reviewed and podcasted by me and Chris Dawes) was definitely ripe for franchising. So straight away we’re not in Matrix territory where the question “Why!? Just why!??” isn’t screaming in your head every few minutes.
In 2.0 we pick up two years after the last movie, where Megan’s creator – Gemma (Allison Williams) and her niece Cady (her name is Cady!?? The whole time you swear they’re calling her “Katie!) played by Violet McGraw – are continuing their lives as the only family each one of them has. Except now Gemma is a staunch and vocal advocate for AI regulation due to her knee-jerk reaction to being almost killed by a robot AI (of her own making, it should be said) and Cady (in turn) is following in her aunts’ footsteps (of sorts) by being a computer science nerd.
In an overcompensating effort by Gemma, she ensures Cady takes Akido lessons so she can defend herself. Unfortunately Cady takes those lessons to an unwanted extreme by regarding Steven Segal as a martial arts poster boy, and one beaten up school bully later, Cady gets in trouble; Gemma is at her wits end, and we soon realise life between them is full of tension. For Gemma still punishes herself for putting Cady in harm’s (Megan’s) way, and Cady hates on Gemma for… reasons. She’s a teenager now, so it’s Hollywood lore she be a little bitch to any authority figure in her life. To be honest, you kinda zone out when you go through their motivations ‘cause you’re keen for the Megan goodness to begin.
And that gets kick started by the presence of another killer robot named Ameila (played by NOT Olsen sister, Ivanna Sakhno). However, unlike Megan, Ameila is very lifelike in face and body, as she is constructed NOT to be a faux babysitter for kids, but as a turbo charged infiltration assassin for the CIA.
How she came into existence is the McGuffin that drives the Main Plot of this film, as we simultaneously find out that (shock surprise) Megan is still “alive”, in an online only sort of way. So when Amelia goes rogue (because of course she does) and comes after Gemma and Cady (for reasons you’ll have to watch to understand) Megan’s primary directive to protect Cady at all costs comes to the surface as she demands Gemma build her a new body to literally kung fu fight Amelia (robato robato).
So with our pieces on the board, let’s get into the nuts ‘n’ bolts of M3gan 2.0.
And for a more detailed description of that, as with our last analysis of the first movie, here’s Chris
Dawes with his half of this review.
Dude – I didn’t see it! You went to the premiere without me!
Chris Dawes
Thanks Chris!
Anyway – some highlights worth mentioning is the existence of another Chekov’s Gun in the form of a cybernetic exo-skeleton that makes people super strong (although its application is at least a little funnier/cooler than you’d think).
We also have a new Megan dance number. For those of you who don’t remember, the main (and some would argue, only) reason the first movie did so well, was because of Megan’s hip-hop/ballet moves she pulls before killing Ronnie Cheng. It was a perfectly bite sized Tik Tok moment which gave the film it’s viral boost as countless people imitated it along the lines of Deadpools *Nsync number.
However, Megan’s effort this round – whilst certainly cool – is less memorable due to the fact it doesn’t have any unique & easy-to-copy dance move(s). In the first instalment it was a simple twist of the hips and a rubbery swing of the arms mixed with a sideways head-duck. But for 2.0 she does the Robot (very generic and a bit on the nose) with a 360-degree head spin (which is impossible to replicate). Although in its defence, it’s still entertaining to watch…
Kiwi legend Jermaine Clement guest stars as Alton Appleton, a tech billionaire who serves as both plot device and comedy device.
Another nice (re)addition is the return of Gemma’s two co-workers from the last film Cole (Brian Jordan Alvarez) and Tess (Jen Vann Epps) giving us some nice continuity for 2 characters (and actors) who really don’t need to be there.
And speaking of returning cast – the 2 most important also come back, despite the fact that, had they not, a lot of people wouldn’t have noticed. And they are Amie Donald and Jenna Davis. For they are Megan. More specifically her body and voice respectively.
As Megan was meant to be a pre-teen to match Cady in the first film, the immediate problem they were always facing was, IF they were going to recreate her as before, they would have to recast. But the film-makers clearly appreciate one of the reasons Megan works, is because Donald and Davis clearly work.
And so – with Donald going through the typical growth spurt that comes with puberty – Megan finds herself a foot taller when given her new body, and leaning into this means that the franchise is trying to give the impression each instalment will be a continuation of Megan’s evolution; both in body and in sentience.
And that alone implies this film series will be less Chucky and more Terminator. In more ways than one, as tonally there is a clear shift in Megan’s role from being the Big Bad, to the thing that fights the Big Bad (just like Arnie did in T2)
The Prognosis:
The film-makers have put careful thought into this sequel by analysing the first film’s success, identifying what worked, and leaning into those markers.
So checklist time:
1. Is it a clone of the original? NO
2. Is it a clone of the original but simply more and just bigger? NO
3. Does it expand the universe/lore of the original? YES
4. Is it a good standalone film without relying too heavily on the original? YES
5. (Optional) Does it have a cool new gimmick or element that’s not in the original film, but sits well within the universe of the first film? (Eg: Think Yoda and his ground breaking puppetry in The Empire Strikes Back. Or the CGI T-1000 in T2). NO
6. Does it identify the SPIRIT of the original, and duplicate it? YES definitely.
Because the biggest thing the film-makers have wisely clocked is that Megan ISN’T a horror film, but a fun film. Camp fun. And that’s what makes this movie an upgrade from the original.
Surgeons of Horror 