So often when filmmakers attempt to remake a beloved niche genre film or a cult classic, you wind up with a product that may, on the surface, resemble the earlier version, but that misses the point completely. Or one that doesn’t seem to grasp what people love about the original. Writer/director Macon Blair’s (Green Room) new incarnation of Troma Entertainment favorite The Toxic Avenger is not one of those movies.
On the heels of last fall’s Aftermath, the better of the two armored-car-robbery-on-a-bridge movies that came out within a week of one another (the less said about Sylvester Stallone’s abysmal Armor, the better), Mason Gooding (Scream) and Dylan “Not Jughead” Sprouse are back for another team up. This time they team up for Under Fire, a throwback action comedy that is itself a follow up to director Steven C. Miller’s 2024 Werewolves, which if you haven’t seen, is a fine time.
There’s been talk of a new Red Sonja movie for what feels like forever. Multiple stars and high-profile filmmakers have been attached in one form or another, until it seemed like it was destined to languish just out of reach in development hell. But here we are, in the year of our lord 2025, and M.J. Bassett, the director behind Solomon Kane and Rogue, among others, has finally delivered the goods.
Wilderness survival tales, sagas of human endurance in the face of overwhelming, unrelenting odds, are common fodder for movies. But like other oft-visited genres, they can be the staging grounds for moving, powerful stories. (It feels like I’ve written a lot about this lately when it comes to post-apocalyptic films doing fresh, interesting things.) There’s plenty of room for thrills and edge of your seat tension, and they’re perfect showcases for human resilience, the triumph of man over nature, and that sort of thing. It also helps that they tend to have relatively small casts. And into this fray comes Hugo Keijzer’s directorial debut, The Occupant.
I say this every time I review one of his movies, but watching Ma Dong-seok (aka Don Lee) clobber dudes is one of modern action cinema’s purest pleasures. What director Lim Dae-hee’s new film, Holy Night: Demon Hunters, proposes is, what if, instead of dudes, there were demons, and Ma punched them in the face, too? That sounds like a match made in heaven. Or hell, as the case may be.
Blazing Fists is a much more manageable title for prolific Japanese director Takashi Miike’s new film, which is also known as Blue Fight: The Breaking Down of Young Blue Warriors. That’s a mouthful. Whatever you call it, this is a fairly straightforward action drama about young men using sports, mixed martial arts in this case, to rise above meager circumstances. But don’t worry, this is still Miike, so it also has biker gangs, violence, oddball flourishes, and a sardonic crime boss bored with the world in a casual, terrifying way.
A woman stands in a desert in the darkening twilight, looming over a man, tied to a chair, burning to death at her feet. This is Irene Kelly (Michaela McManus). She’s travelling dimension to dimension, methodically killing every version of Neville (Jeremy Holm), the serial killer who murdered her daughter. It’s a hell of a first image to kick off Kevin and Matthew McManus’s (The Block Island Sound) indie sci-fi thriller Redux Redux.
