TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA (2026) – Ambitious “Horror” Movie Not Helped by Inaccessible Storytelling

FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980) meets SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950). Joe Gillis, learn who you are through Norma Desmond, while the two of you tie your identities to Jason Voorhees. And that my friends, is today’s movie in a nutshell. Sort of.

With a title like TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA (2026), this one definitely sounds like it’s going to be a horror movie comedy spoof, but it’s not. It’s not really even a horror movie, actually. The opening scene takes care of that. We see a couple approaching the killer who immediately makes short work of them, igniting a volcanic eruption of blood firing into the sky. This sequence emitted some chuckles from the audience, but more importantly, it made clear that this really isn’t going to be a horror movie, not with an unrealistic blood fountain like this one. It makes Monty Python look subtle.

So, if not a horror movie, what is TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA exactly? Let’s find out!

Let’s get the plot out of the way first, which on the surface, is a rather interesting one. A very young director, 29 year-old Kris (Hannah Einbinder) has been hired to make a reimagined reboot of a famous slasher horror movie series, the CAMP MIASMA series, which back in the day rivaled both the FRIDAY THE 13TH series and A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET series. The lead actress in the first CAMP MIASMA movie quit acting right after it, and she did not appear in any of the sequels, and over the subsequent decades, became a recluse. Kris feels that the key to making her movie a success is gaining the perspective of this reclusive actress, and so she lands a meeting with her.

To Kris’ surprise and shock, she discovers that the actress, Billy (Gillian Anderson) lives on the site of the campground where the original movie was filmed. The rest of the movie, in terms of plot, involves Kris getting to know Billy and trying to figure out how to make her movie a success. Pretty straightforward plot, but this movie isn’t interested in this straightforward plot. It’s interested in a whole lot more.

The main topic in this movie is queerness. Kris identifies as queer, and she’s trying to make a movie that celebrates queerness even though the Hollywood powers that be who hired her really aren’t interested in that, and as she says, feel like they have done their duty simply by hiring a director who identifies as queer, because many of the original CAMP MIASMA movies had anti-trans sensibilities.

But more than this, Kris is also learning more about herself, as Billy peppers her with personal questions and gets Kris to admit that she does have trouble with sex and relationships. So, a lot of TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA revolves around the understanding of self and also the acceptance of being queer and just what that means and feels like.

But there’s more.

I mentioned SUNSET BOULEVARD, and this movie is referenced a couple times of times here in CAMP MIASMA, as Kris likens her visit with the reclusive Billy to William Holden’s encounter with Gloria Swanson’s reclusive Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s 1950 classic. And the story here does touch briefly on one of the main themes in SUNSET BOULEVARD, ageism, as Billy does reference that even though she had quit acting, after she reached a certain age, Hollywood stopped calling her.

And for my money, Gillian Anderson gives the best performance in the movie as Billy, as she is an eccentric character who is not above using her acting abilities to keep the young Kris off balance. When they first meet, Billy tells Kris she lives at the camp because the killer in the movies, Little Death, is real and lives in a hole in the bottom of the lake, and so someone must always be at the campsite to receive him when he emerges. She convinces Kris that she is crazy and unhinged, before breaking out into hysterical laughter in a perfect “gotcha!” moment. She does this several times in the movie, each time providing Kris with a teachable moment on things she can use for her movie.

Anderson is terrific, which of course is no surprise. Obviously, she’s most known for her now iconic portrayal of Dana Scully on THE X-FILES, but she’s also been in a bunch of other movies and shows, with several notable performances in recent years. She played Margaret Thatcher on the TV show THE CROWN (2020), and she played BBC reporter Emily Maitlis in the movie SCOOP (2024). She was exceptional in both roles. Her performance here in CAMP MIASMA is equally as good.

The way Billy maneuvers around Kris reminded me of another classic movie of yesteryear, THE STUNT MAN (1980), where maniacal director Eli Cross (Peter O’Toole) runs circles around his stunt man Cameron (Steve Railsback), who’s actually on the run from the police, in order to achieve what he wants for his movie. Billy does the same here with Kris, but the question is, what is it exactly that Billy wants? In a way, she wants to be seen and have her life validated, and she can do this through Kris’ movie. The dynamic between Billy and Kris, which plays on their age differences and as a result cultural differences, is also a key part of this one. All this being said, none of this is all that clear cut, which works against this movie.

And that’s because TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA was written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun, and precise storytelling is not her strong suit. Schoenbrun previously wrote and directed I SAW THE TV GLOW (2024), another acclaimed horror movie that didn’t quite work for me mostly because a lot of its story just wasn’t all that accessible.

Now, I love smart horror movies, but for a smart horror movie to really work, the audience has to understand what is going on, and while complicated layered stories are terrific, if the story becomes too complicated or not all that clear, it will lose its audience. That happened for me with I SAW THE TV GLOW and to a lesser extent here with CAMP MIASMA.

It’s obvious here that Schoenbrun and CAMP MIASMA are most interested in queerness and how that affects one’s individuality and life in general. I have no problem with this. The problem I have is that this and other themes in this movie simply aren’t always clear.

The main killer in this movie, Little Death (Jack Haven) is a trans character who was trans in the first movie but wasn’t really identified as such by the filmmakers other than he was a “freak” and that’s why the characters in the initial movie killed him, and that’s why he returned as a supernatural killer, to seek his revenge. His look in this movie with an air vent as a mask reinforces the notion that this is not a serious horror movie. It’s a serious movie, but not a horror movie. In terms of plot, Little Death’s motivations are easy to understand, but in the bigger picture of the plot of the Kris/Billy storyline, it’s unclear what their relationship to him is, other than Kris grew up with the series and because of it the character is etched into her consciousness.

Schoenbrun makes the intriguing leap into the idea of movies becoming conscious, with the point in this film that Kris makes as she says that it’s not just people watching movies, but movies watching people. Schoenbrun made a similar attempt in I SAW THE TV GLOW. It’s kind of a muddled idea, one that doesn’t completely work. The better idea, that moviegoers are indeed shaped and their lives influenced by movies, which is what happened to Kris, is more realistic and resonates more readily.

Schoenbrun’s view is there again when Billy describes Kris’ previous movie as remaking PSCYCHO from the perspective of the shower curtain. Which for me just gets a shrug of the shoulders. Why do I care about a shower curtain’s perspective? Intellectually, I get it. Oh, the things a shower curtain has seen! But getting back to PSYCHO, I’d rather see it from the perspective of a differenct character than the shower curtain!

The best scene in the movie is when Kris has an online meeting with her Hollywood producers, and she explains her new idea for the reimagining, and the producers don’t get it at all. This scene speaks to the disconnect between creative artists and business types in the movie world, and it also serves as one more attempt to explain the real director, Schoenbrun, and her ideas for making this movie TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA. Kris takes a line from Billy’s story, that there is a hole in the bottom of the lake, and it’s from this hole that the movies are generated, and it’s not the movie makers and actors making the movies, but the lake itself. In terms of Kris, she’s saying her new reimagining is going to be from the perspective of the lake, and in terms of Schoenbrun, she’s saying TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA is also from a totally different perspective, but what just that perspective is, is unclear, and that’s a major problem I had with this movie. I can see the queerness perspective, and I’m good with that, but even here, the film doesn’t make things all that clear.

Hannah Einbinder does turn in a good performance as Kris, and she and Gillian Anderson drive this movie forward, even as its plot and theme ideas meander all over the place. Einbinder is the daughter of original SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE star Laraine Newman.

The image towards the end of the film of a blood-soaked scantily clad Kris lovingly roaming around town with blood-soaked Billy is jarring to say the least and also a head-scratcher. Life imitates art, art imitates life, life is a bloody mess, movies are bloody, people love bloody movies and identify with them, so much so that they become part of one’s life at a deep, deep level. Some may find this disturbing, while others embrace this connection. All of this comes to mind. None of it is hammered home.

So, yes, there is a lot going on in TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA. It’s just not all that accessible. Also, while Schoenbrun does capture the look of the old FRIDAY THE 13TH movies, the horror elements in this one simply don’t hold water. It’s gruesome at times, yes, but it’s not really a horror movie, per se.

Another great sequence is when young Billy (Amanda Fix, in a sincere performance) films her sex scene where Little Death appears. This scene is returned to repeatedly and used by present-day Billy to explain her feelings on sex, which are very different from Kris’. The sequence captures the psychological pain Billy endures as do other young women in similar situations, and the most intriguing part is, this is true, yet we’re seeing young Billy use her experience and pain to film a scene in a movie, which is being watched by older Billy and Kris in this movie!

TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA is definitely an ambitious movie. But its confusing storytelling techniques don’t do it any favors.

I give it two and a half stars.

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RATING SYSTEM

Four stars – Perfect, Top of the line

Three and a half stars- Excellent

Three stars – Very Good

Two and a half stars – Good

Two Stars – Fair

One and a half stars – Pretty Weak

One star- Poor

Zero stars – Awful

MUTINY (2026) – Latest Jason Statham Vehicle Rather Muted

If you’ve seen one Jason Statham movie, you’ve seen them all.

So say some movie viewers and critics.

I don’t completely disagree with this statement. I mean, Statham has a distinct onscreen persona, one that I happen to enjoy, and so yes, he tends to play the same role over and over again, as do many action film stars, so his range is not always on full display. This is not necessarily a bad thing.

To be fair, Statham does on occasion shake things up a bit, as he did in the giant shark adventure, THE MEG (2018), and in the comedy SPY (2015) where he was one of the best and funniest parts of that Melissa McCarthy comedy as he parodied his tough guy persona to perfection. But more often than not his movies are pretty much the same, and while he is generally entertaining in all of them, sometimes you get a really good Jason Statham movie, and other times you get a not so good Jason Statham movie.

MUTINY (2026), Statham’s latest, definitely falls into the latter category. Earlier this year, Statham starred in SHELTER (2026), an okay action movie, but MUTINY, his latest, is a less-than-okay action movie.

It opens, rather slowly I might add, with Statham playing former military hero and cop now turned bodyguard Cole Reed protecting his client, wealthy businessman Tibu Campallo (Ramon Tikaram) in Bangkok. When they are ambushed on the road, and Tibu is killed, and Cole is framed for the murder, Cole decides to go undercover and find out who is responsible for his client’s murder, and then ultimately, seek justice.

His clues lead him to a cargo ship, and once on board, he discovers the ship is carrying a bunch of immigrants to be sold into slavery, and so Cole being the natural hero that he is, vows to rescue these people. The bulk of the movie then follows Cole’s attempts to do just that, along with the help of a female officer, Angie Ellis (Annabelle Wallis) who seems to be the only member of the crew not involved with the slavery scheme. The main villain in this one becomes the ship’s corrupt captain, Marko (Roland Moller) who had nothing whatsoever to do with the murder of Tibu. And once the proceedings on the ship are eventually wrapped up in Cole’s favor— you didn’t think a Jason Statham character was going to lose to the bad guys, did you?— he returns to his main mission to seek vengeance for the death of Tibu, in a neat and all-too-quick ending. It’s just a weird construct for a story because the majority of the movie has nothing to do with Cole’s initial desire to seek vengeance for his murdered employer or even to clear his name.

I’m guessing this disconnect has to do with the origins of the screenplay. Director Jean-Francois Richet, who directed the Gerard Butler actioner PLANE (2023) had intended to do a sequel to that movie, called SHIP (gotta love those ambitious titles!), but plans were scrapped when Gerard Butler left the project, and the film was re-written to fit Jason Statham. It feels as if the wraparound story of the assassinated businessman was added after the main story of the immigrants being smuggled on the cargo ship. The bottom line is the screenplay by Lindsay Michel and J.P. Davis isn’t very good. Not only is the plot uneven, but the dialogue is barely memorable. Statham doesn’t even get any good lines.

The action sequences are also meh. There are some violent combat scenes, but most of the action involves gunfights, and director Richet chooses to keep the camera in tight on his actors, which often is a good thing, but doesn’t work all that well in this case. They’re on a cargo ship, and for the majority of the time the camera is tight on the actors’ faces, meaning we don’t really get a feel for being on that ship. It’s a wasted opportunity.

Jason Statham is fine in the lead as Cole. He continues to look the part of the believable action hero, but he gets no good lines of dialogue, and his character isn’t fleshed out in the least. I’m a big fan of Annabelle Wallis going back to her days on the TV show PEAKY BLINDERS (2013-2019), and she’s made her share of movies, including some horror movies, like the first two ANNABELLE movies, but like Statham, her role here is not helped one iota by the script. In short, there’s little she or Statham do in this one to lift the material.

Roland Moller does make for a formidable villain as the evil captain, and the final fight sequence between him and Statham is the best action scene in the movie. And Ramon Tikaram delivers an effective albeit brief performance in the beginning of the movie as businessman and Cole’s friend Tibu.

For an action movie, MUTINY is rather muted, but one thing that wasn’t muted, and for me, was the best part of this one, was the audience I saw it with. They were vocal! And I’m not talking teenagers here. I saw MUTINY with a decent-sized crowd, and these folks were all around my age, which is to say, we’re all of that “certain age” category. Senior rates can apply! Anyway, there was cheering and roars all in favor of Jason Statham, and there was one woman behind me in particular who was having a grand old time. When at the end of the movie, Statham’s Cole declares that he’s there for one thing and one thing only, vengeance!, the woman behind me followed suit with a loud, Yesssss!!!

Who said audiences of a certain age can’t enjoy a good old fashioned bloody violent action movie?

That being said, the audience was the liveliest part of this movie. The movie itself was just standard fare, even with the presence of two actors I generally like, Jason Statham and Annabelle Wallis.

Because of their presence, I give this one two stars.

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RATING SYSTEM

Four stars – Perfect, Top of the line

Three and a half stars- Excellent

Three stars – Very Good

Two and a half stars – Good

Two Stars – Fair

One and a half stars – Pretty Weak

One star- Poor

Zero stars – Awful

INSIDIOUS: OUT OF THE FURTHER (2026) – Sixth Film in INSIDIOUS Franchise Has Its Moments

Anything further, father?

Anything, further, father? That can’t be right. Isn’t it anything farther, further?

That’s Zeppo, and of course Groucho Marx delivering the second line, from the classic Marx Brothers comedy HORSE FEATHERS (1932).

This Groucho Marx joke always comes to mind when it’s time to revisit the Further, the world in which the demons reside in the INSIDOUS series. Maybe it’s this joke or just me, but for whatever reason, I just can’t take the name of the Further in these movies all that seriously.

That being said, I do like this series, which is a guilty pleasure for me, starting with the first movie, INSIDIOUS (2010) which was one of my favorite horror movies of the early 2010s. Its first sequel, INSIDIOUS: CHAPTER 2 (2013) wasn’t half bad either, but then it was downhill from there with lesser programmers like INSIDIOUS: CHAPTER 3 (2015), INSIDIOUS: THE LAST KEY (2018), and INSIDIOUS: THE RED DOOR (2023), which I actually kinda liked. As I said, all of these movies are guilty pleasures for me, mostly because of the strength of the original film in 2010.

Now comes INSIDIOUS: OUT OF THE FURTHER (2026), and the gimmick here in this sixth INSIDIOUS movie is that the main character possesses the ability to bring things out of the Further and into the real world, meaning both physical objects and… gulp!… demons! Where’s Scooby Doo when you need him?

In INSIDIOUS: OUT OF THE FURTHER (2026), Gemma Hall (Amelia Eve) is a single mom raising her 9-year-old daughter, Maya (Island Austin), and they live in the same house in Pittsburgh where Gemma was raised by her single mom. Dads are noticeably absent in this movie. In fact, they’re never mentioned, not even once. Anyway, Gemma’s mom suffered from psychotic episodes and made little Gemma’s life a living hell, and she even took her own life in front of young Gemma, who as an adult vows to stay in the house she grew up in so she can have the life she never had as a child. Oka-ay. I mean, she could have this life in a different house without all the emotional baggage, but that wouldn’t set the stage for the plot of this movie, which has Gemma beginning to suffer from psychotic episodes of her own, including extremely vivid and horrific dreams. Gemma fears she is becoming her mother.

But wait! It’s not this at all! It’s really— demons! Gemma learns this when in one of her dreams, she meets Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye), the one character who has been in every INSIDIOUS movie. When the series started, she was the paranormal investigator who initially informed the haunted characters all about the Further, and after she was killed off, she continued on in the series living in the Further, helping people from that side of existence, because, as she says in this movie, “It’s what I do.” Elise tells Gemma all about the Further, including why one demon in particular is interested in Gemma, because he wants to use her and her ability to escape the Further and return to the human world.

Blah, blah, blah.

The plot of INSIDIOUS: OUT OF THE FURTHER is not its strong point. The screenplay by director Jacob Chase, based on a story by David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, and based on characters by Leigh Whannell, is heavy on exposition during its second half when it should have been busy scaring its audience, which it doesn’t do. It’s during the second half where Gemma finds the answers to what’s been going on with her, and unfortunately, most of these plot points are contrived and not very believable, and the movie makes little effort to try to make any of it believable.

Part of the problem with the Further is that it has its own set of rules, and the writers seem to make up these rules as they go along. To go into the Further, it’s wise not to say there too long, so you need a timer and someone to wake you up after five minutes to bring you back before things get too out of control. So, it’s kinda like Freddy Krueger land because you have to be asleep to get in, which for me, always makes things less believable when you have characters operating in a dream-like world.

Gemma can bring things both in and out of the Further, but how she can do this is never explained. The evil humans who are helping the demon inside the Further have to be asleep as well, and so much hullabaloo is made about finding these people and waking them up so they can’t work their dastardly deeds inside the Further. Holy alarm clock, Batman! They must be stopped from going farther in the further, or is that further in the farther?

Anyway, plot wise, the movie just comes off as flat out unbelievable.

However, behind the camera, director Jacob Chase does carve out a couple of really frightening sequences during the movie’s first half, and these were well done and appreciated. One of my favorite parts of the original INSIDIOUS, was when I saw it in a packed theater, people were screaming out loud. Frequently. It was that scary a movie. The best sequence in INSIDIOUS: OUT OF THE FURTHER is when Gemma enters her daughter’s makeshift playhouse in their living room, made up of sofas and sofa cushions, and she suddenly finds herself— in a sequence worthy of the horror movie BACKROOMS (2026)- in an endless maze of corridors in which she is joined by some very creepy visitors. And the best part is there is a moment in this sequence where the audience did gasp, groan, and scream, the best moment of the movie, and the one moment which captured the spirit of the original INSIDIOUS.

Chase also crafts a frightening sequence in a dentist’s chair. But during the film’s second half, when things should be even scarier and more intense, the story gets bogged down in plot exposition and the frights are nowhere near as effective as the two aforementioned sequences.

Amelia Eve makes for a strong heroine in Gemma, even if the role isn’t terribly exciting. She briefly suffers some angst about turning into her mother, but this goes away quickly once she learns about the Further, and then she becomes a kick-ass leading lady, which isn’t as rewarding as it sounds since the bulk of her actions take place in the magical world of the Further. One more thought about the Further: this place should be terrifying. It should be a place both the characters and the audience do not want to enter. But it’s not. Instead, it’s a dreamlike realm with some spooky stuff here and there but where ultimately characters survive just fine. This is a major drawback to the INSIDIOUS movies. The Further is nowhere near as frightening as it needs to be.

Young Island Austin is fine as Gemma’s daughter Maya, and speaking of young, Brandon Perea plays Gemma’s cop boyfriend, and he looks like he’s about 12 years old! Yes, I’m exaggerating, but he does look incredibly young. Okay, not 12. More like 13!

Maisie Richardson-Sellers plays Clare, the woman who helps Gemma in the real world and helps her to communicate with Elise. Laura Gordon plays Gemma’s mother and is very good in her few scenes. Gordon also starred in LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL (2023).

Joseph Lopez plays Lester, the main baddie in this one. I’ve been calling him a demon, but Lester is really a human who died while he was doing evil things here on Earth, which is why he wants to get back to human Earth in order to continue those evil things. Again, blah, blah, blah. Lopez is sufficiently creepy, and if he looks familiar being all evil and eerie, it’s because we just saw him do the same thing in another horror movie, PASSENGER (2026) where he played— you got it, the evil Passenger!

And once again Lin Shaye returns as Elise Rainier, and while Shaye has always been a strong point in this series, she can play this role in her sleep, and while she’s fine here, and while Elise continues to kick demons in the butt in the Further, it’s nothing we haven’t seen Shaye or the character do before. That being said, I like Shaye in this role, and wouldn’t want to see an INSIDIOUS movie without her in it. She’s to this series what Donald Pleasence as Dr. Loomis was to the original HALLOWEEN series.

INSIDIOUS: OUT OF THE FURTHER has its moments. Unfortunately, most of them come during the first half of the movie. Still, I enjoyed this one for what it was, the sixth movie in a horror movie franchise that truth be told, I have a soft spot for, and so I admit I may be a bit biased.

And that’s as far as I will go. No farther. No further. No farther further. Further farther.

Furthermore…

I give this one two and a half stars.

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RATING SYSTEM

Four stars – Perfect, Top of the line

Three and a half stars- Excellent

Three stars – Very Good

Two and a half stars – Good

Two Stars – Fair

One and a half stars – Pretty Weak

One star- Poor

Zero stars – Awful

IN THE SPOOKLIGHT: THE CRIMSON CULT (1968)

A pair of sixes? I’ve got that beat. Check this out. A pair of Frankenstein monsters!

Sure, in cards, it means nothing, but in the movies, now we’re talking!

And that’s because in today’s IN THE SPOOKLIGHT movie, THE CRIMSON CULT (1968) we have Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee.

Boris Karloff, of course, achieved international stardom for his performance as the Monster in Universal’s classic FRANKENSTEIN (1931), while Christopher played the Creature in the first color remake of FRANKENSTEIN, Hammer’s THE CURSE OF FRANKNSTEIN (1957), also a worldwide hit, although it would take one more role for Lee, as Dracula, in HORROR OF DRACULA (1958) to make him a household name.

Karloff and Lee, although from different horror eras, actually had a lot in common and some shared history. They starred together twice, the first time in the very good horror movie, CORRIDORS OF BLOOD (1958) where Karloff played an overzealous doctor and Lee played a sinister graverobber and murderer with an awesome name, Resurrection Joe. The second and final time they starred together was in this movie, THE CRIMSON CULT (original title CURSE OF THE CRIMSON ALTAR), which unlike CORRIDORS OF BLOOD, is not a good movie. Lee considered it one of his worst films. It’s actually not that bad, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

Karloff and Lee were also good friends in real life and actually lived right next door to each other for a time. In fact, it makes for one of my favorite Christopher Lee stories. As he told it, he used to get a kick out of seeing people do a double take when both he and Karloff would come outside in the morning to bring out their trash at the same time. They also played a few of the same roles, from Frankenstein’s creation to Fu Manchu.

Karloff was ill during the making of this movie, and in most of his scenes he was in a wheelchair. Sadly, he would die just a year later. THE CRIMSON CULT would be the last Boris Karloff movie released during his lifetime.

It’s the swinging 60s, and antiques dealer Robert Manning (Mark Eden) travels to a remote mansion in search of his missing brother whose last correspondence alluded to his being at this house. Manning arrives at a wild party, hosted by the lovely Eve Morley (Virginia Wetherell), who tells Robert she hasn’t seen his brother. She invites him to talk to her uncle and the owner of the house, J.D. Morley (Christopher Lee). Morley is overly polite and hospitable, and even though he tells Robert he has never seen his brother, he invites Robert to stay as a guest in the house for as long as he wants while he searches for his missing sibling, which pleases Robert to no end, not only because it will help him search for his brother, but he is instantly attracted to Eve. Speaking of Eve, Morley does warn Robert that his niece hosts some wild, crazy, and very loud parties, and as long as that doesn’t bother him, he’s welcome to stay.

Also staying at the home is Professor John Marsh (Boris Karloff), an expert on the occult. Marsh is rather grumpy and continually gives Robert lots of grief for a variety of things, like not appreciating fine brandy, for example. The longer Robert stays at the house, the more he is convinced that one, his brother was there, and two, something weird is going on. He receives warnings from the home’s unstable servant, Elder (Michael Gough) to leave before he is killed, and he also begins to suffer from very vivid nightmares where he is taking part in some sort of demonic ceremony.

And when he discovers a secret passageway, the answers are just a dusty corridor away.

Okay, in terms of story, the one told in THE CRIMSON CULT is not terribly exciting. In fact, it’s rather boring. The screenplay by Mervyn Haisman, Henry Lincoln, and Jerry Sohl is pretty much a mystery at heart, and the horror elements are all downplayed.

It’s pretty bad when the demonic sequences, with Barbara Steele playing the undead witch Lavinia Morley are all dull and tepid. Director Vernon Sewell certainly could have made this one a better horror movie, but for some reason he doesn’t emphasize any of the horror parts to this one. There are tons of scenes of conversations about horror stuff, witchcraft and curses and the like, but nothing much actually happens.

The reason to see THE CRIMSON CULT, and the reason at the end of the day, it’s really not an awful horror movie, is the pairing of Christopher Lee and Boris Karloff. Both are fun to watch in this movie.

Lee plays Morley as the relaxed, polite, and perfect host. He seems amused by his niece’s antics and genuinely concerned that Robert cannot find his brother. He also beams in his scenes with Karloff. You can tell that Lee enjoyed filming these scenes. In fact, supposedly, Lee only signed onto the movie knowing that he would be able to star once again with Karloff.

And Karloff is a lot of fun as the grumpy witchcraft scholar Professor Marsh. He steals nearly every scene he’s in. He’s actually pretty darn funny throughout.

For that matter, Mark Eden is surprisingly watchable as lead man Robert Manning. The role as written is a snooze, but Eden makes the guy sympathetic. He also gets the best line in the movie, and the one time the screenplay strikes gold, when he comments on how the house seems spooky, and that you get the feeling that “Boris Karloff is going to pop out at any moment!” And of course, Karloff shows up in the next scene. A memorable bit, but the movie sadly has no more of these.

It does have violence, blood, nudity, and yet it resonates like a PG mystery rather than an R-rated horror flick, which is no surprise, as it was made by Tigon Films, a British film company that tried and failed to compete with Hammer and Amicus. Tigon also produced one of Peter Cushing’s worst movies, THE BLOOD BEAST TERROR (1968), which was also directed by Vernon Sewell. Probably Tigon’s best movie was the Vincent Price horror flick WITCHFINDER GENERAL (aka THE CONQUEROR WORM (1968), as that one was well received by critics and fans alike.

The ending also doesn’t do the movie any favors. It’s contrived and anticlimactic, and it’s one of the worst parts of the movie. It’s edited strangely, cutting back and forth between Boris Karloff spouting plot exposition explaining the answers to the mystery, and firefighters attempting both to put out the fire consuming the mansion and to rescue the revealed villain who is gesticulating from the roof to the crowd below. If you want to learn how to make fighting a fire as boring an exercise as possible, check out the ending to this film. It’s pretty bad if you can’t even make firefighting exciting.

The movie also wastes the fine talents of Barbara Steele and Michael Gough.

THE CRIMSON CULT is far from a horror movie classic, but it does have something to offer, two Frankenstein monsters, Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee, and despite the low standard horror fare here, neither horror master disappoints.

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THE WRONG GIRLS (2026) – Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat Play Amiable Leads in new Stoner Comedy

A stoner comedy for women.

That’s what you’ve got with THE WRONG GIRLS (2026), a new comedy starring Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat as best friends who among other things spend most of their days getting high, and in this movie, when they accidentally get their hands on a secret government drug, not knowing what it is, they— of course!- decide to take it, and hilarity ensues!

Well, that’s the idea, anyway. I always judge comedies by how much I laugh, and while I did laugh frequently during this movie, the bottom line is at the end of the day, the screenplay by writer/director Dylan Meyer isn’t all that funny. I mean, it’s light and enjoyable, but the humor could have been sharper and more on target.

Frankie (Kristen Stewart) and Molly (Alia Shawkat) are best friends and roommates who aren’t quite living the dream. Frankie is a college drop-out who currently works as a delivery driver, but she’s no slouch, as supposedly she’s a genius who just was bored with college which is why she dropped out. Molly is a wannabe chef but spends most of her days creating dishes which incorporate weed, and so yes, Frankie and Molly spend most of their days getting high together.

Frankie is also insanely jealous of Molly’s down-to-earth boyfriend, Josh (Zack Fox), who is a really nice guy and wants Molly to move in with him, which of course, Frankie does not want. When Frankie is mistaken for someone else at a bar by a government agent, the agent delivers to her a case which is supposed to be delivered to that someone else. The next morning, Frankie barely remembers what happened, but she and Molly open the case, find what looks to be vials of a drug, and they of course decide to try some.

This drug gives them mind reading abilities, and when their cats lap up some of the spilled drug on the floor, the felines start talking! Whoa! Yup, talking cats, voiced here by Seth Rogen and Kumail Nanjiani. Frankie and Molly decide that they may be able to make a lot of my money by selling these drugs, and so they set out to do so. Meanwhile, the government agent is informed that he handed the briefcase to the wrong person, and so he goes off in search of Frankie and Molly, who are also being pursued by dangerous henchmen who want to steal the drugs from them, and the shenanigans of these three storylines are what make up the rest of this movie.

THE WRONG GIRLS is fun enough, and its story is light and frivolous. It’s just not overly funny, as the gags and jokes don’t all land. For example, when the cats first start talking, it’s funny, and when we first hear Seth Rogen and Kumail Nanjiani speaking as the cats, there are some laugh out loud moments, but this gag continues throughout the movie, and it’s less and less funny as it goes on.

The best sequence in the movie is when Frankie and Molly crash a private party in the hopes of selling the drugs there. Not only do the jokes work here, but there’s a lot going on, as the henchmen attempt to steal the drug from the girls at this time as well. Speaking of these henchmen, they are not particularly funny, and they’re in the movie a lot. LaKeith Stanfield plays the suffering government agent who is eventually tasked with keeping Frankie and Molly safe so he can get the drug back to its intended destination, and he does enjoy some fine moments. But by the time the plot gets to Kate McKinnon who plays the scientist who created the drug, and her scientist boss played by Geena Davis, two topnotch actresses, the plot has gone stale and the jokes simply aren’t there anymore.

I’m a big fan of Kristen Stewart’s, and I’m so glad her career survived the awful TWILIGHT series. She has some serious acting chops, but it’s unfortunate that so far, she hasn’t had a role that has really landed her some post-TWILIGHT success, unlike her co-star Robert Pattinson, whose list of integral roles continues to grow. While Stewart has been making movies regularly since the TWILIGHT series wrapped up in 2012, the last movie I saw her in was the deep-sea thriller UNDERWATER (2020), in which she was excellent. Here in THE WRONG GIRLS, she enjoys many fine moments, and for me, her performance was the best part of this movie. There’s a scene where all she does is silently mouth an obscenity, and it had the audience I saw the movie with laughing out loud. Stewart is a genuine talent.

And she enjoys fine chemistry with her co-star here, Alia Shawkat, known for the TV series ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT (2003-2019). Shawkat also was in the thriller BLINK TWICE (2024), which starred Naomi Ackie and Channing Tatum. Here, as Molly, Shawkat plays the amiable and more laid back of the two friends.

Chris Estrada gets some humorous bits at their landlord Jose, who never stops talking, and this trait makes for a funny sequence where he happens to discover the henchmen trying to break into the girls’ apartment.

THE WRONG GIRLS was written and directed by Dylan Meyer, who also cowrote the comedy MOXIE (2017). THE WRONG GIRLS is Meyer’s directorial debut, and it’s a decent one. Meyer scores high— heh,heh– from behind the camera, as the direction is energetic and creative, exactly what you would expect in a comedy like this. The writing is decent as well, but it’s simply not as funny as it needs to be to really work as a really good comedy. But as things stand, it’s not bad, and she has two very likable actors, Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat playing the leads, and they do a terrific job. Incidentally, Meyer and Kristen Stewart have been married since 2025. And in more family news, Meyer is the daughter of writer/director Nicholas Meyer, who directed two of my all-time favorite movies, TIME AFTER TIME (1979), and STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (1982).

I enjoyed THE WRONG GIRLS well enough. I just wish it had been funnier.

I give it two and a half stars.

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RATING SYSTEM

Four stars – Perfect, Top of the line

Three and a half stars- Excellent

Three stars – Very Good

Two and a half stars – Good

Two Stars – Fair

One and a half stars – Pretty Weak

One star- Poor

Zero stars – Awful

THE RIVALS OF AMZIAH KING (2026) – Matthew McConaughey in Limited Screen Time Carries Comedic Thriller

Presence is a thing.

Some performers have it. Others do not. Matthew McConaughey has it, and then some.

And that presence is on full display in today’s movie, THE RIVALS OF AMZIAH KING (2026), a dark comedy and thriller in which McConaughey plays a down-to-earth southern beekeeper who’s generous to a fault, and who eventually runs afoul of some sinister rivals who aim to steal his business from him. As we learn in this movie, the beekeeping business is full of unsavory characters. Who knew?

With McConaughey in the lead, the first half of this movie fires on all cylinders and makes for pretty much perfect storytelling, but… but McConaughey is gone for the entire second half of this movie, and that presence I was talking about, it is sorely missed during the film’s second half, which is nowhere near as compelling as the first half, which is not a good thing, because how you finish is always more important than how you started. And it’s not just the lack of McConaughey which impacts the film’s latter half. There are other issues as well. But when you have a performer with the onscreen charisma of Matthew McConaughey leading the way and carrying a movie, and then remove him completely, well, that’s a loss that is really difficult to overcome, and this movie doesn’t overcome it.

THE RIVALS OF AMZIAH KING opens wonderfully with Amziah King (Matthew McConaughey) arriving at a drive-in restaurant in Oklahoma where he and his friends break into an impromptu concert at the outdoor eatery. The laid-back mood in this sequence sets the stage for the tone of the rest of the movie. And when the police and two federal investigators arrive to question Amziah, he makes a joke about it but then seeing their serious reactions quips if he shouldn’t be joking about their presence. Turns out, Amziah isn’t in any trouble, but they need his help as the local bee expert in trying to identify a truckload full of barrels of honey which the investigators believe to be stolen.

Amziah agrees, which then sets up the first of two enormously interesting and laugh out loud sequences in the movie. The first involves Amziah organizing an impromptu gathering of his friends and employees to help quickly melt down the honey so he can search for any identifying marks at the bottom of the barrel which would help the investigators identify the owners of the honey. This sequence is not only captivating, led by McConaughey’s on point performance as King, but when a gruesome accident occurs out of the blue, it becomes hilariously funny, not because of the violent injury, but because writer/director Andrew Patterson perfectly captures everyone’s natural human reactions, from horror to revulsion to caring. It’s an impeccable sequence.

The second is later on in the movie when Amziah and his staff are called in to a middle school to help them control a swarm of bees found inside the school. Again, Patterson captures perfectly the reactions of everyone involved, and for anyone who’s ever worked at a public school, this sequence nails what that’s like having to deal with the rules and regulations in the middle of a crisis, from keeping students on a bus to the use of smoke to keep the bees at bay. It’s all hilarious.

In the midst of these sequences, Amziah is reunited with a former foster child, Kateri (Angelina LookingGlass) who along with her brother had lived with Amziah and his wife years earlier when they were children, but the system moved them to a different family when Amziah’s wife died. Now meeting Kateri as an adult, Amziah offers her a job with him working with the bees. She accepts and finds she has a knack for it.

But then all the bees are stolen, and the second half of the movie deals with the aftermath and trying to save Amziah’s business. It’s this half that doesn’t work as well. It pretty much becomes Kateri’s story, as she declares that she is going to get Amziah’s business back up and running, and at the same time, find out who stole his livelihood and make them pay. Angelina LookingGlass is very good as Kateri, and she gives a really good performance and creates a likable character in Kateri, but without Matthew McConaughey along with her, things just aren’t as compelling.

But it’s not just the lack of McConaughey. Andrew Patterson’s screenplay simply isn’t as good during the film’s second half. The first half takes its time, we get to know the characters, and the situations all play out beautifully. It’s like the savory aroma and eventual taste of a slow-cooked meal. But the second half while still taking its time, doesn’t delve in directly to the more sinister aspects of its plot. Kateri’s investigation is interesting enough, and she makes good on her threats to get revenge, and all of this is satisfying, but the characterizations and situations in the film’s latter half simply aren’t as on target. The story shows us things in the first half, but it tends to tell us things in its second, and in storytelling, there’s a big difference between the two.

Even the presence Kurt Russell doesn’t help. He shows up as the immoral businessman who stole Amziah’s bees, and as Kateri learns, because of his connections, he’s pretty much untouchable, but she continues to persist until she finds a way. Russell is good in the role and avoids making the guy a cliche, but he’s not in it much, and his presence doesn’t add a whole lot to the story. We’re told what kind of man he is, but we are never shown it.

THE RIVALS OF AMZIAH KING almost feels like two different movies. The first half is four star perfect, with Matthew McConaughey leading the way. It’s light, fun, and heartwarming. The second half, however, which becomes a melodrama, simply lacks the edge and precision of the first half.

I’ve been singing Matthew McConaughey’s praises throughout this review, and that’s because he’s a terrific actor. I first noticed him years ago in the compelling thriller, A TIME TO KILL (1996). While he continued to make movies, it took him a while to really make his mark, and that started with his exceptional performance in THE LINCOLN LAWYER (2013) and continued with such films as MUD (2012), DALLAS BUYERS CLUB (2013), which won him an Oscar for Best Actor, INTERSTELLAR (2014) and Season one of the TV show TRUE DETECTIVE (2014) where he costarred with Woody Harrelson. I last saw him in THE LOST BUS (2025) where he played a troubled school bus driver who ends up saving a busload full of school kids during a devastating West Coast fire.

His work here in THE RIVALS OF AMZIAH KING is once again Oscar worthy, even though he’s only in half the movie.

Angelina LookingGlass is solid as Kateri, and she enjoys many fine moments. In addition to Kurt Russell, this one sports a strong ensemble cast who all bring their supporting characters to life, including Jake Horowitz as one of Amziah’s friends who steps up to help Kateri, Scott Shepherd as Amziah’s loyal employee, and the running gag with him is no one can understand a thing he says, which makes for some hilarity during the swarm sequence at the school, Rob Morgan as Amziah’s friend and attorney, Tony Revolori as the man who becomes the victim in the insane sequence with the honey melting, and Bruce Davis as the sincere and down-to-earth Federal investigator who’s been trying without success to take down Kurt Russell’s character, and who gains an unlikely ally in Kateri.

Director Andrew Patterson does a wonderful job at the helm and imbues this one with many rewarding cinematic moments. And evidently all the bees in this one were real. No CGI was employed. This is a good thing and adds to the authenticity of all the bee scenes. His screenplay is a bit uneven, however. It’s pretty much perfect early on but then stumbles when it becomes a melodrama late in the game, mostly because it doesn’t quite capture the intensity needed for this part to work. The best part of the screenplay is the way Patterson frames the story, in the context of the bees, their specific roles, and their relationship to the queen bee. Amziah explains this in a beautiful scene early on, and later, this story comes full circle in the context of Kateri and her relationship with those around her. This part of the screenplay works exceptionally well.

THE RIVALS OF AMZIAH KING is a really good movie. It had a chance to be an amazing movie, because its first half is indeed amazing, but even with its subpar second half, it still features some strong storytelling and benefits from Matthew McConaughey’s presence, which, although limited, still lifts this one to high heights.

I give it three and a half stars.

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RATING SYSTEM

Four stars – Perfect, Top of the line

Three and a half stars- Excellent

Three stars – Very Good

Two and a half stars – Good

Two Stars – Fair

One and a half stars – Pretty Weak

One star- Poor

Zero stars – Awful

THE RUN (2026) – Plot Holes Sink Dystopian Thriller

Is that… a baby?

One of the characters in this movie actually says this, and that’s because today’s movie, THE RUN (2026), a dystopian thriller which hails from Australia, tells a story in the not-too-distant future, 2036 to be exact, where a fertility crisis has made it so babies just aren’t born much anymore. Furthermore, a pandemic has wiped out large swaths of the population and turned the whole world into an apocalyptic wasteland.

It’s in this world where the events of THE RUN take place, a story about a smuggler, Mac (Callan Mulvey) who is forced to make deliveries for an unseen employer who is holding his ailing wife hostage. When his latest “delivery” turns out to be a young woman Aliah (Charlotte Maggi) and her baby, and he learns that she is being chased by the baby’s father Damien (Taylor Wiese) and his brothers, who had been holding Aliah and other women as prisoners for years before she escaped, Mac decides to ignore his ruthless employer and instead get Aliah and her baby to safety at a promised haven on an island.

As stories go, the one told in THE RUN should be a really good one, but sadly, it’s not.

Writer/director Stephen de Villiers does a nice job at the helm, as this one nails the look of an apocalyptic thriller, and the landscape at times reminded me of the MAD MAX series by George Miller. But his script unfortunately is full of plot holes which completely get in the way of the story in this movie.

For starters, when we first meet Aliah, she is in the back of a van being taken away to be sold by Damien’s mother, but a man working for Mac’s employer stops the van and overpowers the driver. His job is to get the baby to Mac, and Mac will deliver the baby to its destination, but Aliah fights back, knocks out the man, and escapes with her baby.

When Mac arrives at his destination for the pickup, he learns that the man never arrived with the “package.” At the same time, Damien and his brothers show up looking for Aliah, and when she sees them, she sneaks into the back of Mac’s car and forces him to drive away. Okay, so, Mac’s contact never shows up, but then Aliah coincidentally enters Mac’s car on her own? I’m sorry, but this is not very believable. It gets worse.

Mac is suddenly talking to his employer, complaining that he can’t believe they want him to transport a baby; yet how does he know that this is his “package” when she showed up in his car on her own? The plot would have unfolded so much easier had the drop happened as expected, and then Mac could have reacted to having to transport a baby.

Even worse— as I said, there are plot holes galore— Damien and his brothers torture Mac’s contact for information on Aliah’s whereabouts, and before he dies, the contact tells Damien that they are messing with the wrong people. This is a nice set-up for a strong plot point, having Mac, Aliah, and the baby on the run from both Damien and his brothers and the even more violent employers who also happen to be holding Mac’s wife hostage. I was really into things at this point, in spite of the muddled storytelling regarding Aliah and Mac.

But you know what? This plot triangle never happens because believe it or not, the ruthless employer and his minions never show up and all but disappear from the storyline. The second half of the movie pits Mac and Aliah against Damien and his brothers, and that’s it. Furthermore, when Mac goes all in with saving Aliah, he seems to basically forget that his wife is being held hostage. He doesn’t talk about her anymore. In fact, this whole plot point conveniently disappears.

It’s all very sloppy storytelling, which is too bad, because this one had lots of potential.

I enjoyed the three leads well enough. Callan Mulvey is believable as the weathered, tired, smuggler who has seen it all but who isn’t so jaded that he won’t help Aliah. The one thing missing from both his performance and the character is he seems to forget all about his wife, so there’s no angst whatsoever from the guy on the topic of “I have to save my wife.” This plot point just goes away. Mulvey has been in lots of movies. He played the character Jack Rollins in both CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER (2014) and AVENGERS: ENDGAME (2019).

I also enjoyed Charlotte Maggi as Aliah. She makes the young mother feisty and tough, even though she ends up needing Mac for help getting to safety. Taylor Wiese is sufficiently creepy and demented as Damien. He makes for a nice villain.

There are some decent scenes here in THE RUN, but it never really reaches edge-of-your-seat status. It should have, but it doesn’t. The ending is somewhat exciting, but to be honest, the muddled storytelling got in the way of nearly everything about this movie. I was distracted throughout wondering why Mac wasn’t thinking about his wife, and where the deadly goons who were employing him had disappeared to. And the pacing didn’t help, as this one went from moderate to slow. It just never really gets off the ground, which is unfortunate because its premise was really promising.

I give this decent looking yet poorly executed thriller one and a half stars.

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RATING SYSTEM

Four stars – Perfect, Top of the line

Three and a half stars- Excellent

Three stars – Very Good

Two and a half stars – Good

Two Stars – Fair

One and a half stars – Pretty Weak

One star- Poor

Zero stars – Awful

SHOCK SCENES: DRACULA’S DEMISE – THE UNIVERSAL DRACULA SERIES

Welcome back to SHOCK SCENES, that column where we look at classic scenes from classic horror movies. A few years back, I wrote a four-part column on the endings to the Hammer Dracula movies. Now, it’s Universal’s turn.

DRACULA (1931)

As much as I love DRACULA (1931) and Bela Lugosi’s iconic portrayal of Count Dracula (and I do love this movie. It’s one of my favorite Dracula films), the ending unfortunately is a clunker. When Professor Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) drives a stake through the heart of Dracula (Bela Lugosi), the action occurs off camera. All we get are the sound of the hammer hitting the stake and Dracula’s groans, as the camera is on Harker (David Manners) and Mina (Helen Chandler). It’s a very undramatic and tepid ending to an otherwise glorious horror film. Compared to Hammer’s first, HORROR OF DRACULA (1958) which features the best ending of any Dracula movie ever, well, it’s like King Kong vs. an ant. There is no comparison. Yet, somehow 1931 audiences and those who followed didn’t mind, as the film became a hit and combined with FRANKENSTEIN (1931) later that year launched the Universal monster movie cycle which would continue until the late 1950s, as well as the movie careers of Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff.

DRACULA’S DAUGHTER (1936)

There are actually two “deaths” to cover here in DRACULA’S DAUGHTER, the very underrated sequel to Universal’s DRACULA. Not a hit when it was released, most likely because neither Dracula nor Bela Lugosi appeared in it. This was a new story about Countess Zaleska (Gloria Holden) who just happens to be Dracula’s daughter. The action picks up right where DRACULA left off. In fact, Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) is arrested for the murder of Dracula, but eventually the charges are dropped because Dracula’s body disappears, and that’s because Countess Zaleska steals her father’s body in order to give it a proper send off. In one of the movie’s most atmospheric scenes, and the movie is chock full of atmosphere, Zaleska burns her father’s body.

DRACULA’S DAUGHTER has aged very, very well, to the point where it’s one of my favorite Universal monster movies. In addition to its fine creepy atmosphere throughout, it creates a host of intriguing characters, including Countess Zaleska, her evil servant Sandor (Irving Pichel), Professor Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan), heroic psychiatrist Jeffrey Garth (Otto Kruger), his pesky sidekick and secretary, Janet, played by the very sexy Marguerite Churchill, and the frequently frustrated Scotland Yard Inspector Sir Basil Humphrey (Gilbert Emery). All of these folks come together for the exciting conclusion in Castle Dracula. While the very ending is hardly cinematic, and not overly satisfying, as jealous Sandor does in the countess, it still makes for a more exciting ending than what we saw in the 1931 DRACULA.

SON OF DRACULA (1943)

SON OF DRACULA, the third Universal Dracula movie, is also steeped in rich atmosphere, but of a different kind. The action takes place in the deep South of the United States, on a plantation, and there is a sultry southern atmosphere throughout this one. This is another Universal monster movie that has aged well over the years.

Lon Chaney Jr. took over the role of Dracula here. The script implies he’s the original Count Dracula. The movie’s title says otherwise. It’s never made clear. Anyway, from the get-go, critics complained that Chaney was miscast in the role. Decades later, his performance has aged well. Chaney played all four of the main Universal monsters- the Wolf Man, the Frankenstein Monster, Dracula, and the Mummy. For me, his only misfire was the Frankenstein Monster.

His interpretation of Dracula is largely unique because it’s the only time he played the character, and he plays Dracula as a menacing hulk of a vampire. It’s a far cry from how Lugosi played the role or how John Carradine would play it in the next two Universal Dracula flicks. In the later Hammer movies, Christopher Lee played a violent, quick Dracula, with frightening cat-like reflexes. Chaney’s version is less mobile but every bit as discomforting. He gives off a deadly vibe. You wouldn’t want to be standing in the same room as the guy. So, I generally like Chaney’s take on Dracula. It’s less sensual, more evil.

The ending to this one isn’t bad, but it’s not great either. As a kid when I watched it, I thought Dracula was a whiny cry-baby as he begs his adversary to put out the fire which is consuming his coffin with desperate cries of, “Put it out!” Visually, it’s not bad, as it’s a step above what we saw in the first two movies. But in Universal’s first three Dracula movies, the endings are not their strong points, compared to the endings to their first three Frankenstein movies, which were all very exciting.

HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1944)

John Carradine took over the role of Count Dracula in Universal’s next installment, HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1944), which featured the Frankenstein Monster (Glenn Strange), the Wolf Man (Lon Chaney, Jr.), and Dracula. I’ve never been a big fan of Carradine’s interpretation of the role. He’s far too polite and gentlemanly. However, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with his performance. It just has never wowed me.

Anyway, in terms of the Count’s demise, the sequence in HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, unbelievably, because the movie taken as a whole is just okay, features one of the most thrilling end-to-Dracula scenes in the whole franchise, set up by an exciting chase sequence, as the police pursue Dracula (John Carradine) as well as the villainous Dr. Niemann (Boris Karloff) and his hunchbacked assistant, Daniel (J. Carrol Naish). It’s arguably the best chase sequence in the entire Frankenstein/Dracula/Wolf Man series. It even features a neat special effect as we see Dracula reduced to a skeleton by the rising sun. The only problem? This sequence happens midway through the movie. That’s right. The dubious decision was made to kill off Dracula before the Frankenstein Monster and the Wolf Man even show up, one of the main reasons that taken as a whole, this movie is rather subpar. That being said, it’s a doozy of demise for Dracula. One of the series’ best.

HOUSE OF DRACULA (1945)

Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, and the Wolf Man all return for the next film in the series, HOUSE OF DRACULA (1945), a film I generally like a little bit less than HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN. Dracula, again played by John Carradine, gets more screen time here, but once again is killed off early for some bizarre reason, and once more the three monsters don’t really get any screen time together.

Dracula’s demise in this one is okay, but pales in comparison compared to the exhilarating chase sequence in HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN. After a brief chase scene, Dracula is once again exposed to fatal sunlight, although because of a blood transfusion, his undead blood poisons Dr. Edlemann (Onslow Stevens), turning him into an evil Mr. Hyde-like character during the second half of the movie. I would have preferred more Dracula.

ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN (1948)

Originally intended to be HOUSE OF THE WOLF MAN, the powers that be at Universal made the controversial decision to conclude their monster series with a comedy, and so they added popular comedians Bud Abbott and Lou Costello to the mix. The result, unbelievably, is one of the best movies of the entire series. In addition to being one of the funniest Abbott and Costello movies ever, it also did right by its three major monsters, finally giving them solid screen time, even together! And the biggest news regarding this movie is the return of Bela Lugosi in the role of Dracula! While Lugosi played other vampires in the movies, this was the second and last time he played Dracula in the movies.

And for my money, again almost unbelievably, it’s the best Dracula demise scene in the entire series! Sure, it’s quick, but any time you have Dracula tangling with the Wolf Man (Lon Chaney, Jr.), and frankly it’s the only time in the entire series in which this occurs, you’ve got a classic sequence. After a crazy funny chase inside the castle featuring Dracula, the Wolf Man, the Frankenstein Monster, Bud Abbott, and Lou Costello, Dracula prepares to change into a bat in order to escape, but a leaping Wolf Man jumps into the air, grasps the bat, and they both plummet into the rocky ocean below. Cinematic gold!

And there you have it. The demises of Dracula, courtesy of the Universal DRACULA series.

Hope you enjoyed this SHOCK SCENES column, and that you’ll join me again next time when we look at more shock scenes from other classic horror movies.

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THE LAST HOUSE (2026) – Netflix Original Thriller a Dull Dud

The last house.

On the left?

Nope. This one is on the straight and narrow, and as such, pretty much vanilla ice cream boring.

Not a good thing for a movie that bills itself as a science fiction thriller.

THE LAST HOUSE (2026), a new Netflix original movie, is about a family, Jason (Wagner Moura), Ann (Greta Lee), and their two children, living in Seattle, when one day during an unexpected rainstorm, they discover that all the doors in their house are locked, and they can’t get out. Furthermore, when Jason attempts to break out through the locked windows, the glass cracks but doesn’t break. They soon discover, by communicating with signs through their windows, that their neighbors are all in the same predicament.

While they still have electricity and running water, their wi fi is down, and they have no connection to the outside world. While not specified, the assumption is they don’t have a land line phone nor a TV that works without streaming. Not knowing what happened, their attention turns to survival and trying to make the best of things with what they have, in case they’re going to be stuck in the house for a while. When days turn into weeks, weeks to months, and eventually years, survival becomes more and more difficult. Thankfully, Jason is an engineer, and Ann a master at indoor gardening.

But things change when they realize that there are deadly creatures outside which come to the neighborhood when it rains, creatures they increasingly believe are behind the event which trapped them inside their home. These creatures also become more and more aggressive each time they appear. The fight for survival becomes even more intense.

And there’s your plot.

When THE LAST HOUSE begins, it seemed pretty clear that this plot was supposed to be a metaphor for the shutdown the world experienced during Covid-19, being stuck in one’s home with only one’s immediate family without contact from the outside world. I was on board with this concept. However, while this metaphor may be true, it’s not where this movie ultimately goes. It also got me to thinking that this story must take place in an alternate timeline where the Covid-19 pandemic never occurred, because when they are all trapped inside their home, there’s no conversation from Jason and Ann about how they got through the pandemic in 2020 and how they may use that experience to deal with their present dilemma. They act as if being shut inside their house had never happened to them before.

While there are lots of things wrong with THE LAST HOUSE, the biggest problem with this movie is its screenplay by Matthew Robinson. There are more plot holes and lapses in logic than I’ve experienced in a movie in a long time.

Let’s start with the small things. Trapped inside the house with them is the family dog, who whines at the door when he wants to be let out, and Jason apologizes to their canine companion and says that he can just go inside the house, to pick any room and Jason will clean it up. Indeed, there’s a scene later where Jason does quickly pick up some business in the bathroom and other than a quick frown promptly flushes the waste. Now, as a dog owner, I can attest to the fact that “number two business” is not always neat and tidy, but more complicated, is number one. Dogs pee a lot. A steady stream of dog pee several times a day is going to do real damage inside a house. I found this small plot point to be rather unrealistic.

Later, when brilliant engineer Jason creates a trap which is attached to a line which runs through their chimney to the outside world, in effect becoming a form of land fishing, there’s a scene, after Jason had rigged the thing to work automatically, where we see the trap capture a skunk which is then reeled into the home. Yet, there’s no follow up to this scene. A skunk will spray, and a skunk killed in a trap reeled into a home is going to flood that home with its odor. Yet, no mention of this is made, which was a head scratcher for me. I mean, why even show us a skunk?

But there are bigger problems here, much bigger. Take the central premise. We learn that these creatures, who come from the sea, by the way (yet we’ve never discovered these creatures before?) created this apocalyptic event because they were fed up with the way humanity was maltreating the Earth. But how exactly did they do this? What’s in the rain that keeps every human inside their home from leaving? Super glue? It’s never explained, so for a major plot point, it’s a major plot hole. For the people who weren’t in their homes, it seems as if these creatures killed them. Still, for the sheer number of people on Earth, this idea of trapping them inside their homes is not only far-fetched but not very believable.

And their plan was… to trap people inside their homes and wait for them to die? Apparently. And that’s why this movie is called THE LAST HOUSE because this family is so good at surviving, that the creatures didn’t expect it to go on for this long. Which is why they decide to break in to kill the family, and why the family decides it’s time to break out and take their chances on the outside, which makes no sense because the Earth now is teeming with these deadly creatures.

And just how they do it, which involves a silly plot point about showing empathy, is as stupid as the rest of the plot in this movie. And that’s the bottom line. The plot to this one is unbearably dumb.

It also doesn’t help that the characters in this movie are completely dull and boring. Even worse, the dialogue is forgettable.

Director Louis Leterrier doesn’t do much to make things better. The conclusion to this one, where the family declares all-out war against the creatures, at least picks up the action, but to be honest, it was too little too late. I never got over the distraction of thinking how this story made no sense, that the creatures’ plan to strike back against humanity was farfetched and unbelievable.

The creatures themselves sound just like similar monsters in other recent movies like the QUIET PLACE movies, for example, but their look is inferior. Leterrier also directed Marvel’s THE INCREDIBLE HULK (2008) and NOW YOU SEE ME (2013).

I usually enjoy Wagner Moura, but like the rest of the cast here, he’s stuck playing a boring role with very little to say. His character is fixated on the “I will protect my family to the end” mantra forever, and in a better movie, this would have either become a bigger problem if the film were going dark or he would have become more heroic if the film were more uplifting. It does neither.

In fact, that’s another knock against this one. This family is stuck together in one house for years. This is the perfect set up for some pretty dark stuff, a look at how hard this is on everyone, but the movie barely touches upon this.

Back to Moura, he wowed with his spot-on performance as Pablo Escobar in the TV series NARCOS (2015-2016), and he’s also been very good in movies like SERGIO (2020) and CIVIL WAR (2024).

Greta Lee shares the same fate as Moura with her performance as Ann. It’s just ultimately a very dull role.

I didn’t like THE LAST HOUSE at all, and I was actually amazed that a film which began with such promise and a neat initial concept could deteriorate so much that by the time it was over, it was pretty much awful. Most Netflix original movies tend to be really good, but there are some that don’t work, that are duds. THE LAST HOUSE is a dud.

I give it one star.

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RATING SYSTEM

Four stars – Perfect, Top of the line

Three and a half stars- Excellent

Three stars – Very Good

Two and a half stars – Good

Two Stars – Fair

One and a half stars – Pretty Weak

One star- Poor

Zero stars – Awful

THE GENTLEMAN THIEF (2026) – John Travolta Adds Charisma to Lackluster Actioner

When good actors make bad movies.

Not that THE GENTLEMAN THIEF (2026) is all that bad a movie, although it is getting pummeled by critics and audiences alike, but it does star a good actor, John Travolta. And he makes an otherwise dull action flick somewhat watchable.

Not exactly high praise, but then again, this movie isn’t deserving of such.

THE GENTLEMAN THIEF is actually the third film in a series, all starring John Travolta and Lukas Haas as brothers who also happen to be professional thieves. None of these movies have fared all that well, so it’s a head-scratcher that they keep making them. They being director Randall Emmett, who has directed all three, the first two being CASH OUT (2024) and HIGH ROLLERS (2025). The best thing I can say about this one is it doesn’t necessarily play out like a third film in a series. Sure, there are references to prior events, but it still works as a standalone film.

The movie opens with the villain from the previous movie, Abel Salzar (Danny Pardo) escaping from custody as his henchman extract him from a sheriff’s vehicle on the road in a sequence that is a fairly satisfying way to open an action movie. We next meet brothers Mason Goddard (John Travolta) and Shawn Goddard (Lukas Haas), and Shawn invites Mason on a vacation trip to Miami. Mason knows his little brother has a scheme planned, and he doesn’t want to be part of it since he’s retired, but he goes anyway, mostly because Shawn wagers a game of chess over the decision to join him or not, and when he defeats his older brother, the deal is sealed.

In Miami, the whole thievery team is there, for a “vacation,” but of course, Shawn announces his true plans, that they are there to make an art theft. Their target is a rich bully, Hamish Hawkes (Jas Mathur) and his beautiful girlfriend, Violet (Emily Skinner), but unbeknownst to them, Hamish is secretly working with Salzar, who is seeking revenge against Mason. Meanwhile, Mason reconnects with a former contemporary, Odessa (Rebecca De Mornay), who is also retired and now works as an art dealer.

The heist commences, plot twists ensue, and eventually Mason and Salzar confront each other in a very convoluted conclusion.

There are a lot of things wrong with THE GENTLEMAN THIEF. For starters, the thieves in this movie are stupid. Or at least the screenplay by Chris Silvertson gives the audience no insights into any smarts they may have. They intend to carry out a multi-million-dollar art heist. But there’s no planning done ahead of time. None. No discussion or revelation of details. They just show up on the villain’s boat, take out a couple of henchmen, and steal the goods. They’re not even sure where the art is kept on the boat when they get there.

Even more ludicrous, because they all meet in Miami for a “vacation,” no advance planning is done. Shawn simply announces, “oh yeah, we’re here to rob some paintings,” and the team says, “okay, we’re in.” These guys are supposed to be professionals, but they seem like amateurs throughout. And speaking of this team, they are all immensely boring because no one amongst them is fleshed out.

The action sequences, and there aren’t many, aren’t very good, and the majority of the movie, especially as it moves forward, is talky and dull and eventually deteriorates into a very contrived conclusion.

Also, not really sure why this one is called THE GENTLEMAN THIEF. Travolta’s Mason Goddard is polite at times, but nothing is made of this. The movie certainly could have used a better title. THE MOST IDIOTIC ART HEIST EVER comes to mind.

But as I said, John Travolta, a good actor, makes this one somewhat watchable. I mean, he gives Mason Goddard a presence, and he gets a lot of good lines, and Travolta delivers them with impact. The one downside is Travolta is now 72, and while he still looks cool with his shaved head, dark sunglasses, and dyed beard, when his character says things like, “I’m all done with scuba diving,” the line resonates because his body is not in the kind of shape to pull off stunts expected from lead characters in an action movie. Long story short, while Travolta looks younger than 72 here, physically his character is limited by his age, and frankly, late in the game, when he’s running around shooting at muscular enemies half his age, it’s not very believable.

All this being said, I enjoyed watching Travolta a lot in this movie, and he was my favorite part of the film, by far. It’s been a while since I’ve seen Travolta in a movie. The last film I saw him in was in Oliver Stone’s SAVAGES (2012).

Also, Travolta is 22 years older than Lukas Haas, making for a strange bit of casting in that these two are playing brothers. Haas is okay in the role but hardly memorable. It was fun to see Rebecca De Mornay again in a movie. It had been a while. I hadn’t seen her on screen since the Marvel TV series JESSICA JONES (2015-2019) and not in a movie since the 1990s. She’s okay here in a rather dull role.

Danny Pardo is serviceable as main villain Abel Salzar, but the character is done in by a bad script which makes him come off like an old Scooby Doo villain by film’s end. Jas Mathur and Emily Skinner actually fare better and are more interesting as secondary villains Hamish Hawkes and Violet.

The team of thieves working for Mason are a complete snooze.

I expected THE GENTLEMAN THIEF to be horrible. While it’s not very good, John Travolta has enough charisma to make most of his scenes watchable, and the colorful Miami setting adds to the mood, which made this one more enjoyable than I thought it would be. Unfortunately, though, at the end of the day, it’s all pretty dumb and trite, hardly worth recommending. But it’s not awful. Travolta sees to that.

I give this lackluster actioner two stars.

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RATING SYSTEM

Four stars – Perfect, Top of the line

Three and a half stars- Excellent

Three stars – Very Good

Two and a half stars – Good

Two Stars – Fair

One and a half stars – Pretty Weak

One star- Poor

Zero stars – Awful