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Sundance ‘24: Buzzy and Mind-Bending ‘IT’S WHAT’S INSIDE’ Pulls Off a Terrific Magic Trick

Eight former college friends reunite the evening before their friend’s wedding to play a heady game with far-reaching consequences. Such is the set-up for Greg Jardin’s utterly transfixing debut feature, a precisely-constructed explosion of creativity that smashes together the college reunion comedy, puzzle box thrillers, and a Shane Carruth-esque level of science-fiction precision. Skillfully paced to snatch your attention early on and never lose it for a moment, experiencing It’s What’s Inside is like watching a flawlessly executed magic trick for the very first time. Read More

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Shallow, Campy ‘NIGHT SWIM’ Mostly Treads Water

A former Major League Baseball player moves his family to a house with a haunted pool in the campy Jan-horror release, Night Swim. Six months after receiving a career-ending MS diagnosis, Ray Waller (Wyatt Russell), his wife Eve (Kerry Condon), and their two high school aged children, Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle) and Elliot (Gavin Warren), struggle to accept the reality that life as they once knew it is over. Put off by the idea of moving to an assisted living community, Waller finds himself drawn to a house with a shady past (an instance of its evil detailed in the mildly effective cold open) and a mysterious pool. He soon discovers that its waters, drawn from a nearby natural spring, have healing qualities. But not all who wade into its wet quarters fare so well.  Read More

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‘THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER’ Fails to Resurrect the Terror

If there’s one thing an Exorcist movie, be it a sequel, prequel, remake or sequel, needs to be, it’s scary. David Gordon Green’s 50-years later requel, The Exorcist: Believer fails that most fundamental test. The very celluloid of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist hums with tension and terror – each shot more possessed with unspeakable dread than the last. It’s the original nightmare-inducing horror film, a palpable shock to the system that stands up half a century later. It’s especially remarkable when you consider the context: just five years earlier, filmmakers were ensnared in the strict confines of the Hays Code, a moral guideline that prohibited profanity, suggestive nudity, graphic or realistic violence, and sexual persuasions. The thought of a 14-year-old child actor old uttering lines like, “Your mother sucks c*cks in hell” was plain unthinkable just a few years prior. It’s also pretty unthinkable today. Read More

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Chilling ‘THE BOOGEYMAN’ Rekindles Fear of the Dark

A family reeling from the sudden death of their wife and mother. A creature that feeds on grief and weakness. Crippling fear of the dark. These are well-worn horror movie tropes through and through but they are executed to impressive effect by filmmaker Rob Savage in his first traditional feature, The Boogeyman. Savage takes these overcooked conventions and tosses them in a wicked blender of terror and tension to make for a wicked fright fest that could well fling you out of your seat. Read More

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INFINITY POOL is a Hedonistic Descent into Vacation Goblin Mode

“Is this a dream?” Em (Cleopatra Coleman) asks. Back at their luxurious vacation resort in the far-flung fictional developing country La Tolqa, she can’t get over the most recent heinous encounter with local law enforcement involving her and her second-rate author husband James Foster (Alexander Skarsård). They have just killed a man, having struck him with their vehicle after a day of beach gayety. As is standard practice here, his punishment is as steep a price as they come. James is sentenced to die. However it isn’t actually James who is made to pay the ultimate price. He is wealthy and therefore inoculated from consequence. A clone will do just fine. Or as they are referred to in Brandon Cronenberg’s warped vacation thrillerInfinity Pool, a “double”.  Read More

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‘HALLOWEEN ENDS’ Simultaneously a Weird and Rote Send-Off to a Killer Icon

Evil Goes Viral

Even if Halloween Ends is a messy, weird, convoluted, predictable, and only quasi-satisfying conclusion to the 40-plus year Michael Myers saga, you have to give it credit for actually trying something new. For much of director David Gordon Green’s trilogy-capper and alleged conclusion to the franchise (at least for now), Mike Myers is MIA. He’s gone. Not involved. For the vast majority of the film, he exists moreso as the lingering idea of the nature of evil than as an actual hulking killer. Instead the focus is on an entirely new character, Corey (Rohan Campbell), a hapless teen who gets roped into a night of babysitting. One prank gone wrong later, Corey accidents kills his charge.  Read More

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‘SMILE’ Curses Audience With a Bloody Good Time

Grin and Bear It

For those who have experienced it, trauma becomes a dormant passenger. Quietly lurking, but always there behind the curtain. A pile of kindling awaiting a match. In Parker Finn’s supernatural-psychological horror movie Smile, trauma manifests as a suicide curse. When a therapist’s patients brutally kills herself in front of her, Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) becomes the latest victim in a trauma cycle where a compulsion to commit suicide is passed on like a baton. In the world of Smile, if you watch someone kill themselves in spectacularly horrific fashion, you become doomed to die next.

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‘BARBARIAN’ Is Part ‘DON’T BREATHE’, Part ‘WRONG TURN’ and it Rules

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Between 2016’s Don’t Breathe and Barbarian, there’s an emergent sub-genre of horror: Detroit Dystopia. Both films put the urban wreckage of the city’s broken ecosystem under the spotlight to set the scene for unspeakable horrors. Barbarian, if not directly inspired by Fede Alvarez’s 2016 horror hit, shares a lot of the same DNA and influences. Both take place in Detroit’s most rundown neighborhoods – an almost post-civilization shadowland marked by abandoned, graffiti-stained houses, a lack of discernible social services, and the roving few who’ve never left. In the ruin of a once flourishing industrial neighborhood lurks a gaping hole. And in that absence sadism festers. Their tunnels run deep. Read More

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‘CRIMES OF THE FUTURE’ Surgically Digs Into Society’s Bulging Guts

Surgery is the New Sex

The Canadian King of Venereal Horror, David Cronenberg, puts the perfectly bewildering capstone to his legacy of gross, mind-bending body horror with his latest feature Crimes of the Future. At once an exploration of the horrors of the post-post-modern human evolutionary track and a not-too-subtle cry for radical environmentalism, the 79-year old director’s latest stroke of squeamish cinema is a fitting encapsulation of the creator’s  entire demented body of work.   Read More

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Kafkatesque ‘MEN’ Favors Allegory, Mood Over Plot

Men? Meh.

If we feel pain, are we doomed to it? Writer-director Alex Garland’s latest film, Men, is plagued by this one idea: the cyclical, unwavering nature of pain and abuse. Jessie Buckley is Harper, a woman suffering. After a traumatic incident involving her former husband (Paapa Essiedu), Harper retreats to the English countryside to find some quiet away from the city and the life she shared with her ex. While she intends to give herself space for emotional healing, Harper instead finds an intrusive, hellish male community seemingly dead-set on breaking her down further. Events turns more weird, then utterly hellish. Read More