The purest exploitation franchise currently going is back for another (perhaps final, perhaps not) ride, full of heavy-handed political allegory built atop a foundation of gratuitous violence. Never one for subtlety, we expect and receive nothing less from The Forever Purge. You won’t find any unexpected elements, but fans of these films will find much to enjoy.
Any good slasher franchise, like it’s evil centerpiece, is going to be damn near impossible to kill. Such is the case with both Michael Myers and the Halloweensaga which he spawned. Like every movie scheduled for in 2020, the latest installment, Halloween Kills, was delayed thanks to COVID-19. But Blumhouse wants to remind us it is still stalking toward theaters and released this awesome new trailer.
F9, yes, the ninth installment of everyone’s favorite family-centric saga of street-racers-turned-international-agents-of-espionage, is somehow both exactly as ridiculous as expected and even sillier than anticipated. This makes the movie simultaneously ludicrous over-the-top escapism and tediously overwrought nonsense drama. It’s a strange duality. We’ve come so far from the days of hijacking shipments of DVD players.
Don’t you hate it when you move to a small town for work and it turns out there are werewolves on the loose? Yeah, that sucks. Unless you’re watching Werewolves Within, the latest from director Josh Ruben (Scare Me). An adaptation of a video game I’ve never heard of, Ruben and writer Mishna Wolff mix scares and laughs in a way that many attempts to do so fail to achieve. Playing like a horror whodunnit, the result is something akin to a lycanthrope take on Clue or Agatha Christie with monsters. (Literal monsters, not the metaphorical human variety, though the film has plenty of those as well.) It’s one of the most fun, entertaining movies to come out this year, and easily a top-tier video game movie.
Julia Ducournau’s Rawisn’t just one of the best debuts of the past few years, it’s straight up one of the best movies of the last decade. So, of course, when we hear tell of a new movie from the French director, our ears perk up. NEON just released the trailer for her follow up,Titane, about a long-lost child who all of a sudden returns to the world. But I can’t help but think this also looks a bit like a nightmareFast & Furiousmovie. And, sure, what the hell. Check it out below.
In the upcoming thriller Pig, Nicolas Cage plays a hermit living in the woods who goes on a revenge-fueled hunt for his kidnapped truffle pig. Did I write this movie? I don’t remember doing so, but it sounds like something I would do. Regardless, here is the first Pig trailer. Enjoy.
Mushrooms are creepy as hell. We got a bit of that earlier this year with Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth, and to further drive that point home, there’s now South African director Jaco Bouwer’s Gaia. The two films play like companion pieces of slow-burn existential environmental horror, and this offers another a tense, moody narrative that’s part creature feature, part mediation on nature, technology, and our role in the world.
One thing movies have taught us is that, once you decide to leave the criminal lifestyle behind, you’re battle is only partially over. Such is the case of the protagonist in Charles Officer’s crime drama Akilla’s Escape, a noir-inspired tale of one man contending with generational cycles of violence, his own past, and a changing world. Not always as developed or fleshed out as it could be, the film is nonetheless gorgeous to look at and narratively captivating.
When you think you’re going to get a straightforward educational video but you hire George Romero for the project and wind up instead with a hellish nightmare. That’s exactly how The Amusement Park came into existence. And it is truly a demented feel-bad artifact.
