YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING (2026) – Nathan Fielder’s Documentary on Elizabeth Holmes Fascinating and Exceptionally Creative

Can you really see everything?

The answer to that question is really the central point of the new documentary by Nathan Fielder, YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING (2026) where he and his camera crew were invited into the home of Theranos founder Elizabeth Homes 34 days before she would be sent to prison for fraud, the thinking being on Holmes’ part that she has nothing to hide and so she agreed to this intimate and uncensored look into her life.

And the answer to the aforementioned question isn’t that you can never really see everything, but that the more you do see, the less you know, because our minds speculate and wonder. And it’s no wonder that Fielder has a background in magic, because magicians are masters at making people see things that they think they see but in reality, are missing, the “sleight of hand,” where the audience thinks they are seeing something in plain view, but in reality they are missing the key component of the trick; they think they are seeing one thing, but they are really seeing something else.

This isn’t to say that YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING is disingenuous, manipulative, or insincere. It’s not. It comes off as all very true. But it is to say that Fielder has an understanding that the more layers you peel off, and the more you think you know, there’s still always that bit that you don’t know, and so if feels like that “sleight of hand,” where you are seeing one thing, but you know that you should be seeing something else, but knowing what that something else is, that’s the hard part.

The result is an absolutely fascinating and layered documentary that truly succeeds in painting a three-dimensional portrait of Elizabeth Holmes which really does shed light on who she is and how she got into the predicament which landed her in prison. The movie is also an exceptional exercise in how to make an exceedingly creative documentary, as later in the film, Fielder invites actress Amanda Seyfried, who played Holmes in the TV miniseries THE DROPOUT (2022) into the mix, both for discussion and also for playing Holmes again here in scenes which recreate sequences where Fielder wasn’t allowed to use his camera.

Hands down, YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING is an amazing movie.

It opens with Nathan Fielder and his cameras, and sometimes his crew, inside the home of Elizabeth Holmes and her husband Billy Evans and their young children. Billy and Elizabeth are working together now and plan to continue their medical business ventures even when Elizabeth is in prison. It doesn’t take long for the audience to realize that Billy is a narcissist and a very controlling man. In fact, most of the time hearing him speak, I was grinding my teeth in frustration.

During these sequences, Fielder begins to carve out a portrait of Elizabeth as someone who may be brilliant in certain ways, but in other ways, she’s not that savvy and is way too trusting, the point being that she allowed her previous husband to lead her in ways which got her into the legal predicament she found herself in, and this notion is supported by her blindly accepting the narcissistic Billy in the here and now. But Fielder continually questions this notion, pushing back, wondering, is this true, or is Elizabeth so manipulative that she is actively working here on camera to push that narrative forward?

Fielder tells her it seems to him that she lied about what Theranos could do, and in a key sequence, Elizabeth tries to explain why she wasn’t lying. The device was marketed as one that could run all tests from a single drop of blood, but as Elizabeth explains, the device will do this but only after the data is in the cloud. Fielder tries to explain that this sounds disingenuous, that sure the device works, but only if the data is in the cloud first, and as he says, the way Elizabeth explained it, it sounds like it works automatically when in reality it only works if the data is there first. And she can’t see the distinction.

In a telling follow up sequence, Fielder says it reminds him of the famous Abbott and Costello routine of “Who’s On First?” where words are said but the joke is Costello doesn’t understand them, and when he shows Elizabeth this comic clip, she laughs, but she is unable to explain why this is funny. Again, Fielder is left wondering, is she this clueless, this innocent, or is it all an act?

The second half of this three-hour documentary— and much has been made of its long running time, but I’ll be honest, this one actually flew by and it held my interest throughout- where Elizabeth goes to prison, and Fielder can’t bring his cameras there, he invites actress Amanda Seyfried to join him on camera, and she shares her insights on playing Elizabeth Holmes. She then plays Holmes in recreations of sequences where Fielder didn’t have his camera, the key one being in a pre-documentary meeting, where Billy, once Elizabeth had left the room, refused to do the documentary unless they were paid, and he negotiated a deal to do just that. Much later, Elizabeth says in a passing remark that she wasn’t profiting from the movie, which made Fielder question whether she even knew about the deal her husband had made.

Fielder and Seyfried really begin to distrust Billy, and these feelings grow after he agrees to meet with Fielder and Seyfried, and the meeting doesn’t end all that well, as he verbally attacks the actress. More awkward, while they are there, Elizabeth calls from prison, which catches Seyfried off guard, and when she asks Elizabeth if she knew she was going to be there, Elizabeth replies cryptically, that she might have known.

Red flags are raised throughout, but the more they are raised, the less sure the audience and Fielder are about what they mean.

It’s also a brave appearance by Amanda Seyfried, because she takes a lot of heat for portraying Holmes in a TV series that admittedly played fast and loose with the facts. At one point, when she is feeling very defensive, she says it wasn’t her or the TV show that got Holmes in trouble, it was Holmes herself. In short, her defense of herself falls somewhat short, as Fielder does show through interviews with Holmes and Billy how much the show influenced people’s opinions about Elizabeth. Then again, the source of this information regarding this influence is Elizabeth and Billy.

Ultimately, Fielder captures the persona of Elizabeth Holmes as a woman who believes she has done nothing wrong, who accepts Billy and his narcissistic ways completely, and who just may have been naive enough and uncultured in the ways of communicating to have innocently allowed herself to become a victim of the legal system. She may have frauded people, but she didn’t think it was fraud, even though it was. Or— she is an outright liar.

Now, the movie leaves it open, yes, but nothing the movie shows presents Elizabeth as an outright liar. The movie captures her as that person who is unable to grasp the humor of Who’s On First? Now, we the audience can still decide not to believe that, to believe that she was lying and in reality could understand that clip.

And this is what I meant at the outset, in that you can never really see everything. In this movie, we see an awful lot, and we have a pretty darn good idea from what we see of just who Elizabeth Holmes is, but regarding the question of innocence or guilt, seeing all that we see still doesn’t shed light on that question or provide a definitive answer.

I absolutely loved the way Nathan Fielder filmed this one. I also loved his onscreen persona, the quiet, calm, questioner of things, and he lets both the camera and the things both Elizabeth and Billy say speak for themselves. Later, away from them, he questions these things. He always asks the right questions, but the answers are never clear cut. Mostly because neither Billy or Elizabeth ever provide clear cut answers. They both come off as people who cannot be believed, Billy because he is incredibly manipulative, and Elizabeth because she seems to be living in an alternate reality. As Amanda Seyfried says at one point later in the movie about Billy, that he is “batsh*t crazy!” the truth is this notion applies to Elizabeth as well. She seems to be living on another planet. The question here is, by choice, as in being a manipulative liar, or by nature, as in being someone who can’t see reality, who can’t understand the joke of “Who’s on First?”

It was also fascinating to watch both Elizabeth Holmes and Billy on camera. The movie really does give us a raw intimate portrait of these two folks. You really do get an idea of who they are, and the one major uncertainty again is Elizabeth- liar or clueless innocent?

YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING was co-directed by Lance Oppenheim, who just directed PRIMETIME (2026), a movie I did not like. I’m not sure how much influence here he had on this movie, in terms of sharing the directorial duties with Nathan Fielder, but the result is a much better movie than PRIMETIME, so giving credit where credit is due for Oppenheim this time around.

If you want to see a fascinating and utterly creative documentary, then definitely check out YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING. It’ll have you questioning everything, including the intentions of director Fielder himself. One of the last clips he shows, is a very emotional conversation he has with Amanda Seyfried, about his prison visit with Elizabeth. Seyfried is fired up and upset and believes that Elizabeth is a victim of Billy, but Fielder pushes back saying he never witnessed feelings of fear or discomfort from Elizabeth when she was with Billy, but only a deep love.

Seyfried gets really emotional and implies that she feels Fielder is perhaps a bit attracted to Elizabeth and as result too supportive of her, and when Fielder asks her directly why she is so upset, she says, “It’s complicated.” Which, like the rest of the movie, while providing answers, just generates more questions.

In YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING, you pretty much can see everything, but that doesn’t translate to having all the answers. Quite the contrary, you actually leave with more questions, even as the portrait of Elizabeth Holmes revealed in this movie is pretty darn comprehensive.

I give it four 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

PICTURE OF THE DAY: HALLOWEEN (1978)

It’s Halloween. Everyone’s entitled to one good scare.

This line is from John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN (1978), spoken by the character played by Charles Cyphers, and as we approach Halloween on the calendar, I can’t help but remember the HALLOWEEN phenomenon which burst into theaters back in 1978. As such, today’s Picture of the Day column takes a look-see at the original poster for this horror movie classic.

This was not a film that was hyped like STAR WARS. It came out of nowhere, and suddenly, everybody was talking about it. I was a freshman in high school, and I saw this one at the movies with my best friend, and we were able to secure tickets for this R rated movie because back in the day they weren’t so consistent with checking for ages.

I remember clearly the long line outside the theater, and also the loud announcement by a theater employee, “HALLOWEEN is sold out!” and the loud groan of the people in line. My friend and I weren’t among them, as we had already purchased our tickets.

HALLOWEEN was the first horror movie I saw on my own at the theater that really scared me. I had seen JAWS (1975) when I was 11, but my mom took me to see that. And I had seen other horror movies since then at the movies, but they were of the PG variety. HALLOWEEN was a whole other animal.

I remember the sold-out audience screaming throughout the movie, and the part that I noticed then and continue to marvel at all these years later was that most of the screams came when nothing was happening. The violence in HALLOWEEN is minimal. John Carpenter’s masterful direction was mostly about suspense in HALLOWEEN. Michael Myers would suddenly appear, the audience would shriek, and he would just as quickly disappear right after, and the suspense would grow because the audience knew he was still there. Somewhere.

Of course, you can’t talk about HALLOWEEN without talking about John Carpenter’s iconic music, his HALLOWEEN theme. Honestly, what stayed in my head for days afterwards wasn’t the images from the movie, but the music! I couldn’t get it out of my head. I remember when my dad picked up my friend and I after the movie (we were only 14 and no driver’s licenses yet) and drove us back home, Carpenter’s music was embedded in my brain and I couldn’t stop hearing it.

Today, nearly 50 years and a plethora of sequels and reimaginings later, it’s the first and original HALLOWEEN that I like to remember, a movie that along with a lot of other films in the 1970s, put horror back on the map.

The poster above also became iconic. It was everywhere in 1978, with its powerful tagline, The Night HE Came Home! The hand around the knife as part of the Jack O’Lantern. Brilliant. The image, like the rest of the movie, struck fear into audiences everywhere.

If there’s one movie that defines Halloween and is perfect Halloween viewing, it’s John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN. And for those of us of a certain age who experienced it at the theater back in 1978, it’s an experience that one will never forget.

Because as Donald Pleasence’s Dr. Loomis says at one point, “He came home.”

That he did!

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CLAYFACE (2026) – Horror Movie from DC Comics Earns Its R Rating

It’s the A-Team.

That’s all you need to know about CLAYFACE (2026), the new DC movie about the origin story of Batman villain Clayface, and pretty much the first ever horror movie in the DC universe.

Who’s the A-Team? The people who made this one.

The screenplay was written by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini. Flanagan is one of the most talented writers/directors on the planet right now, having created such gems as the Netflix’ series THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE (2018) and MIDNIGHT MASS (2021), two of the best horror TV miniseries in recent memory, and his most recent TV hit is Prime’s CARRIE (2026) based on Stephen King’s novel. And Amini wrote the screenplay for the superior thriller DRIVE (2011).

CLAYFACE was directed by James Watkins, who also directed the well-made horror movies SPEAK NO EVIL (2024) and THE WOMAN IN BLACK (2012).

With these guys at the helm, you would expect something special from CLAYFACE, and that’s exactly what you get. This movie delivers.

CLAYFACE tells the story of Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries), a popular actor whose success is just taking off as he has just been nominated for a Best Actor Oscar, but when he meets a woman on the dance floor of a popular nightclub and accepts her advances and spends the night with her, it turns out to be a tragic decision, as she is the girlfriend of Gotham City’s most powerful mobster, Markos Szabo (David Dencik). As a result, Markos and his goons exact payback by taking a knife to Matt’s face and cutting it up until he is extremely disfigured.

His acting career ruined, and after multiple failed plastic surgeries, Matt turns to a young scientist Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie) who is researching a groundbreaking and controversial procedure using gene therapy to be used on degenerative diseases, but Matt convinces her to use it on him, and she does. At first, the serum works, and Matt’s looks are restored, but then bizarre things begin to happen, as Matt discovers that not only can his skin regenerate, so if he’s wounded, he heals immediately, but he possesses the ability to take on the look of different people.

This comes in handy when he realizes that some of the people he trusted in his life betrayed him, and so he goes on a revenge crusade, with the ultimate goal of taking down mobster Markos Szabo.

For a movie about a comic book villain, for most of this movie Matt comes off as a very sympathetic character. There is no one in this story who he kills who didn’t kinda deserve it, and so it’s not like he’s a murderous monster going after innocent people. This does change near the end, but for most of this movie, the audience is right there rooting for him.

The big thing about CLAYFACE is it definitely earns its R rating with some very graphic images which are often wince inducing. This movie definitely enters body horror territory. That being said, the gore never really reaches the level of a full-fledged horror movie.

And since the filmmakers’ here cited David Cronenberg’s THE FLY (1986) as an inspiration, there are definitely images in the movie that hearken back to Cronenberg’s masterpiece, although again, it never reaches the horrific levels of THE FLY.

While Tom Rhys Harries has a lot of movie and TV credits, this is the first time I’ve seen him on screen, and I enjoyed his performance quite a bit. He succeeds in making Matt a sympathetic character and also a realistic character, which is important considering he’s playing a comic book villain.

Naomi Ackie has starred in such movies as THE THURSDAY MURDER CLUB (2025) and BLINK TWICE (2024), and she’s been fine in these movies, but her performance here in CLAYFACE is her best yet. She makes Caitlyn a three-dimensional caring character. She knows she shouldn’t proceed with the experiment on Matt, but she also sees this as an opportunity to do good and move her groundbreaking research forward. And Matt falls in love with her, and she infuses enough caring and sincerity into her performance that these feelings from Matt come off as natural, even though he is anything but natural at this point with the serum inside him.

David Dencik is sufficiently villainous as mobster Markos, and Max Minghella delivers a sincere performance as Caitlyn’s boyfriend and honest Gotham City cop John Borrelli. Ruby Sear gives a siren-like performance as Markos’ volatile girlfriend, Theresa.

Character actor Eddie Marsan, one of my favorites, lends credibility as Matt’s attorney.

While the screenplay is one of the movie’s strengths, which is no surprise when Mike Flanagan is a co-writer, I also enjoyed the direction by James Watkins. There are a lot of memorable sequences, from the wince inducing scene on an airplane experiencing extreme turbulence where Matt is in the restroom taking a scissors to his eyes to remove skin that is growing over them- most likely you will have to look away from this sequence- with the fun part being the camera is in up close, and you are waiting for that big bump from the turbulence which will make Matt’s hand slip. It’s a great scene! To the lively sequence near the end where Matt infiltrates Markos’ nightclub and wreaks havoc on the dance floor.

I really enjoyed CLAYFACE and was entertained from start to finish. Hardcore fans of the comic may take issue with its deviations from the source material, but as a standalone movie separate from the comic books, it works very well.

Which is no surprise considering the talent of the people behind it.

I give CLAYFACE three 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

YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER (2026) – Story of Muslim Hit Man More Than Just an Action Movie

Your mother your mother your mother.

Say that fast three times in a row.

Okay, so it’s not exactly a tongue twister, but it is certainly an unusual title, and it’s apropos, because YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER (2026) is an unusual movie.

Don’t even get me started that we just had another “mother” movie released last weekend, the dreadful horror movie OTHER MOMMY (2026). The good news is YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER is a much better movie than OTHER MOMMY. Then again, so is STOP! OR MY MOM WILL SHOOT (1992) the infamous awful Sylvester Stallone comedy. (Okay, I admit, I may be exaggerating here. They’re both really bad!)

But YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER is not really bad. It is unusual, as it tells a story about a religious hit man, a Muslim, who suddenly finds himself after his wife dies having to be a single parent for his teenage daughter, 10 year-old son, and infant daughter, all the while having to fend off the sinister forces around him, his employer who wants him to do one more job, and an unhinged aggressive “preacher” who is leading an army of armed Christian soldiers on a quest to stomp out a pornography ring run by a local Muslim.

WTF?

Exactly!

First off, the tone of this one is completely dead on serious. It is much more a drama than an action movie, which considering its plot, really surprised me.

I wanted to see YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER because it starred Mahershala Ali in the lead role. I’ve been a fan of Ali for a while and have enjoyed his performances in such movies as GREEN BOOK (2018) and HIDDEN FIGURES (2016), as well as on the TV shows TRUE DETECTIVE (2019), LUKE CAGE (2016) and HOUSE OF CARDS (2013-2016). As expected, he’s excellent in the lead role here as Latif, the reluctant hit man who has his own code of honor, in that he doesn’t use guns, but swords.

When his wife dies suddenly, the responsibility of caring for his three children falls on his shoulders alone, and most of the movie is about exactly this, his struggles to take care of his children. Complicating matters is his employer Mike Mahmoudi (Laith Nakli) wants him to eliminate the crazed militarized preacher Pastor Hwan (John Cho), because Hwan and his Christian militant group have set their sights on Mike’s son, Hatty (Abubakr Ali), who runs a stripper/pornography business from their luxurious home. Latif isn’t interested, as he is struggling to care for his three children, but Mike won’t take no for an answer, and before Latif even thinks about going after Hwan, the preacher finds him first, and suddenly Latif and his family are being threatened by both sides.

What’s a religious hit man to do?

Why, protect his family of course!

I jest here, but as I said, there is nothing funny or light about YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER. Even the action scenes, which are very good, take a back seat to the drama, and the good news is, the drama, the story, works really well.

The bulk of this movie is about Latif getting to know his children, especially his teenage daughter Adia (Fatiha), and he spends most of the movie in frantic chaotic scenes trying to get breast milk for his infant daughter who is allergic to formula. All these scenes resonate well and better than the action scenes.

Writer/director Bassam Tariq has made a layered movie that also has a lot to say about religion. All of the characters, especially the Muslim ones, question their faith, and conversations surrounding just how relevant God is in the here and now are frequent. Well-deserved jabs are taken at Christian Nationalism with the character of Pastor Hwan and his fellowship. It would be too easy to make all of these characters caricatures, but Tariq doesn’t do this. These folks, in spite of their flaws, really want to believe, and their faith never leaves them.

Last week I gave the movie ANGEL AND THE BADMAN (2026) a hard time because its message of religious faith and Christian values fell flat because it was presented in a vanilla Disneyesque package. Interestingly, YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER does a much better job telling a story about religious faith. Everyone in this movie has their doubts, which comes as no surprise as life for these folks is a hot mess, but the theme of faith never goes away, and late in the game, there’s a moment when Adia absolutely needs help from a higher being and prays her heart out in a gut wrenching scene that really resonates, and this sequence works so much better at showing faith than anything seen in ANGEL AND THE BADMAN.

The supporting cast is solid.

John Cho makes for an interesting villain with Pastor Hwan. Early on, it’s unclear how his and Latif’s paths will cross, and if they will be allies or foes, but the lines are eventually drawn quite clearly. Cho delivers the goods in an effective performance.

Likewise, Laith Naki does a nice job as Mike, the volatile handler who desperately wants Latif for one last job and will play hardball with his enforcer if he has to, and he does.

The young actors here also acquit themselves well. Abubakr Ali has a field day as Hatty, the loud-mouthed often idiotic young Muslim who thinks he’s tough and knows it all, and who’s basking in his stripper business, but he quickly finds out he’s in over his head. And for my money Fatiha gives the performance of the movie as Latif’s daughter Adia. Her strained relationship with her father is at the core of this story, and her crisis of faith moment late in the movie is one of the best scenes in the film.

And Giancarlo Esposito shows up as an elder Muslim and mentor to Latif, in a role not unlike we just saw him play in BY ANY MEANS (2026), in that he’s a force early on, a voice of reason to the main character, but unfortunately doesn’t last long in the story.

YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER is more than just an action movie. It’s a well-written and well-directed drama about a man fighting for his family, in a world where faith is important to everyone, and everyone is trying to understand just where their faith begins and ends.

I give it three 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

WHALEFALL (2026) – Underwater Adventure Too Steeped in Sadness to Really Thrill

Wow, that’s a whale of a problem!

Imagine getting stuck inside a 60-ton sperm whale! How does one get out of that predicament?

Honestly, when I heard of this plot point in WHALEFALL (2026), I couldn’t help but think, you can’t be serious? Is this a comedy or something? Wouldn’t someone swallowed up by a whale just be dead? How would they survive?

But WHALEFALL is anything but a comedy. I wish I could say it’s an intense edge-of-your-seat thriller, but sadly, it’s not, and “sadly” is the operative word here, because if there’s one thing WHALEFALL is throughout its one hour and 46 minutes running time, is sad and depressing. So much so, that I was distracted throughout and never really got on board with the story this one was telling.

WHALEFALL wastes no time playing its sadness card, as in the very first scene we witness a sickly on-his-deathbed Mitt Gardiner (Josh Brolin) on his boat with his best buddy, and it’s clear that Mitt has little time left. He peeks at letters he has left his family, and then he dives off the boat to his death.

We then meet his family, his wife, adult daughters, and his college-aged, estranged son, Jay (Austin Abrams), who unfortunately had a very tumultuous relationship with his dad. In fact, he moved from California to Iowa to go to college mostly because he wanted to get away from his father. Yet, he always wanted to please his dad, and so he goes off on a dive on his own to locate his father’s body, and it’s here he gets in the middle of a battle between a sperm whale and a giant squid, and along with the squid, he gets swallowed up by the whale. And while inside the whale, he hears the voice of his dad, who guides him to survival.

So, there’s your story.

Honestly, I was really intrigued to see this movie, because I was really curious as to how someone could survive inside a whale, and I expected a pretty intense movie. Unfortunately, WHALEFALL offers no insights into how a human could sruvive inside a whale or any background information on whales at all, other than Josh Brolin’s Mitt character- who we see and hear from quite a bit in flashbacks- going on and on about his own philosophical thoughts on whales and the creatures’ place in nature. I really thought the screenplay dropped the ball here.

It also dropped the ball with the emotions, as this one is so steeped in sadness and depression it just lost me. I get the point. Jay and his dad struggled to get along. They both wanted to get along. And in spite of how badly his dad treated him, Jay still loved his dad, dives into the ocean to find his dad, and once inside the whale, relies on hearing the voice of his dad to survive, and the two have a reconciliation after Mitt is dead. I get all this.

The problem is in those flashback scenes, we see Mitt treat Jay so horribly, it’s to the point where I’m asking, why are we even seeing a story built around this guy? Sure, he was aware that he was being too harsh on his son, but so what? It didn’t change the way he treated him. We witness Jay enduring such emotional angst at the hands of his dad, it’s pretty much abusive. So, this whole storyline just lost me. I didn’t care about Mitt at all, and I couldn’t help but think Jay would be better off without him.

The screenplay is also completely devoid of humor, which comes as a surprise, because director Brian Duffield wrote the screenplay, based on a book by Daniel Kraus, and Duffield previously wrote the screenplay for the lively horror movie THE BABYSITTER (2017), a film that was full of humor and was quite funny.

Actors Austin Abrams and Josh Brolin are reunited following their pairing in Zach Cregger’s WEAPONS (2025). Speaking of Cregger, we just saw Austin Abrams in the lead role in Cregger’s RESIDENT EVIL (2026), a horror movie that was incredibly funny. Humor goes a long way, and it is sorely missing from the proceedings here in WHALEFALL. It even affects the performances.

Austin Abrams was so much fun to watch in RESIDENT EVIL, but he’s sad beyond belief here in WHALEFALL. Likewise, Josh Brolin’s performance makes Mitt a guy I just wouldn’t want to know.

Even with a decent supporting cast, which includes Elisabeth Shue and John Ortiz, the acting, like the rest of the movie, is a downer.

I also wasn’t impressed by Brian Duffield’s directorial effort. The scenes inside the whale should have been exceedingly intense and exciting, but they’re not. There are a couple of decent sequences, like when Jay is tangling with the squid which like Jay is still alive inside the whale, but so much of the camerawork takes place up close, you don’t really get a feel for what Jay is going through. I get it, as it is supposed to capture a claustrophobic feeling, and it does do this up to a point, but the camera never pulls back enough to give the audience a feel for what it is like inside that whale. Most of the shots are all close ups of Jay’s face.

The CGI effects are also nothing to write home about. Obviously, the filmmakers here didn’t shoot “on location” inside a whale’s body, and pretty much everything we see in this interior setting, as well as shots of the whale itself, never reach the level of no doubt believability.

It also doesn’t help that every time things do get a tad intense, Duffield “treats’ us to another flashback, where we have to suffer through another scene where Mitt torments his son. Even the “dad knew what he was talking about” reveals late in the movie, where Jay remembers things his dad said to him, and uses them to survive, fall flat, because as I said, Mitt is such an abhorrent character.

Yet, I was mildly intrigued throughout this one, mostly because it’s not every day you see a story about a guy trying to survive while inside a whale. That being said, “mildly” intrigued is a disappointment, because there’s nothing “mild” about a human being trying to survive after being swallowed up by a whale.

This one should have been much better.

I give it 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

IN THE SPOOKLIGHT: THE MONSTER THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD (1957)

This Halloween season, I have giant monsters on the mind, specifically from the golden age of giant monster movies, the 1950s.

The decade of the 1950s was the gold standard for giant monster movies. It’s the decade which first saw Godzilla emerge from the ocean depths in the original GODZILLA (1954) and also featured for my money the best giant monster movie ever made, the giant ant thriller THEM! (1954). 1954 was certainly a good year for giant monster movies.

But one giant monster movie that doesn’t get as much love as many of the others from the decade, films like THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (1953) and TARANTULA (1955), is one that I think is among the better made giant creature films from the 1950s, and that movie is THE MONSTER THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD (1957).

Part of the problem, I think, with THE MONSTER THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD, is it features as its monster a giant mollusk. Yeah, a giant clam is about as frightening as a giant moth. (Sorry, Mothra!)

The good news is the creature in this movie doesn’t really look like a giant clam, but more like a giant larva of an aquatic beetle, which is certainly more frightening looking than an oversized clam!

Speaking of frightening, that has always been my favorite part of THE MONSTER THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD, which is, at times, it’s pretty darn scary! The monsters are pretty frightening looking, and director Arnold Laven films this one like a full-fledged horror movie, complete with jump scares here and there, the best being a scene where a man is looking about silently after hearing a noise, and when you least expect it, bam! The monster attacks!

Laven does a nice job at the helm, and while THE MONSTER THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD was his only horror movie credit, he did direct several episodes of the PLANET OF THE APES TV show in 1974.

The movie also benefits from having its story take place in an intriguing setting, a town situated around the canal system of California’s Imperial Valley. The canal system setting adds to a lot of the suspense in this one, as the creatures make their home there.

In THE MONSTER THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD— actually a better title would have been THE MONSTERS THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD, since there are lots of these giant critters here— these oversized mollusks start killing people, and it’s up to the personnel at the military base there to solve the mystery, led by commanding officer Twill (Tim Holt) and Dr. Jess Rogers (Hans Conried). During the investigation, Twill gets to know Gail Mackenzie (Audrey Dalton), a secretary at the base, and her young daughter, and Twill and Gail begin to see each other in a relationship that resonates better than the traditional wooden romances in 1950s horror movies.

Twill and Rogers eventually solve the mystery and put a plan in place to destroy the creatures, but not before lives are lost and in the movie’s climax, one of the creatures emerges from dormancy in the lab and attacks Gail and her daughter. Will Twill arrive in time to save them? It’s a 1950s giant monster movie, what do you think?

The cast is solid.

Tim Holt makes Twill a three-dimensional character. At first, he’s a strict by-the-book military officer, but his relationship with Gail reveals a softer side. Holt enjoyed a long movie career, mostly in westerns, and THE MONSTER THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD was his only genre credit.

As I said, Audrey Dalton as Gail generated some nice chemistry with Tim Holt as the movie’s lead couple.

Hans Conried brings authenticity to his role as Dr. Jess Rogers. Conried had a gazillion credits, even showing up on an episode of KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER (1974). Conried is probably most famous for providing the voice of Captain Hook in the Disney animated classic PETER PAN (1953).

The screenplay by David Duncan and Pat Fielder is a good one. It has a compelling story to tell, has better dialogue than most of the 1950s giant monster movies, and creates three dimensional and interesting characters. In fact, the screenplay is one of this movie’s strengths, which comes as no surprise as both these guys had a ton of writing credits. Duncan wrote several other horror movie screenplays, including THE BLACK SCORPION (1957). MONSTER ON THE CAMPUS (1958), and THE THING THAT COULDN’T DIE (1958), as well as the English language version of Toho’s RODAN (1956). He also wrote the screenplay for George Pal’s version of H.G. Wells’ THE TIME MACHINE (1960).

While Pat Fielder wrote mostly for television, he also penned the screenplay for one of my favorite Dracula movies not made by Universal or Hammer, THE RETURN OF DRACULA (1958).

And the look of the monsters here are cool and frightening. No, they’re not super huge like Godzilla or Tarantula. They’re more the size of the giant ants found in THEM! The other cool thing about these monsters, besides the fact that they look scary, is that they’re unusual. It’s not every day you get to see a creature billed as a giant mollusk which more accurately resembles a giant sea beetle!

THE MONSTER THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD scores high on the scare meter, especially those of the jump scare variety, something that was rather unusual for giant monster movies in the 1950s. It may not be in the top three of these 1950s creature features, but for a movie we don’t often here about much anymore, it’s certainly in the upper echelon of this subgenre.

And we’ll close with yet another reason why these creatures are scary. While Twill and his military personnel are struggling to contain the giant mollusk threat, Dr. Rogers utters a chilling reminder as to why these creatures are difficult to pin down when he says, “We must remember that these creatures can travel over land too.”

Yikes! Double threat!

So, watch out. While you may set your eyes on the water, don’t forget to keep an eye looking over your shoulder, because these babies move on land as well. They just might sneak up on you, and by then, as some folks in this movie discover, it’s way too late!

Happy clam digging!

-END-

ANGEL AND THE BADMAN (2026) – Tepid Western Substitutes Christian Values for Story Conflict and Characterizations

ANGEL AND THE BADMAN (2026) is a remake of a classic John Wayne movie of the same name from 1947.

It’s also produced by Angel Studios, and that, really, is all you need to know about this one and how it plays out.

Angel Studios is not officially a Christian based company, but it does focus on faith-based stories and on what it calls, “values-based entertainment.” It also avoids profanity, nudity, sexual content, and graphic violence, as if these things are in and of themselves evil. They are not. And that’s the problem I have with faith-based values-based stories. They dumb down attitudes towards controversy, and label things that sometimes are necessary to tell stories based on truth, because after all, the truth is often messy, as “bad,” and so you have a story being told with the emotional maturity of a child, with good and bad, and no gray. In the hands of a company like Angel Studios, a work like TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, for example, would play out like a Disney movie.

That being said, if you are a fan of Hallmark movies, you’ll no doubt enjoy ANGEL AND THE BADMAN. It’s a safe wholesome family romantic western. But if you’re a fan of cinematic movie westerns, you’ll most likely be bored.

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against wholesome stories, and I know there are plenty of people in the world today who want to see this kind of movie. I have no problem with that. But this is a story about an outlaw and a murderous gang chasing him. So, for this story the vanilla style of movie making just doesn’t cut it.

In a nutshell, the plot is about a “bad man,” Quirt Evans (Zachary Levi) who is an outlaw and on the run, who is wounded and then nursed back to health by a family on a farm, which includes the lovely adult daughter, Penny (Meg Fraser), her mother, Irene (Jean Louisa Kelly), her feisty grandmother, Harriet (Melissa Chambers), and precocious little brother Johnny (Barrett Ellis Luca) who conveniently strolls around talking like he’s living in 2026. It’s no surprise, of course, that in this movie Quirt and Penny fall in love, and so when the outlaws who are pursuing him, since he stole their gold, show up, of course it’s up to Quirt to protect them, because, in this movie, they are helpless females. Well, not really. They do fight back. But there’s no way this one isn’t ending with Quirt riding in on his horse to save the day, and that’s exactly what happens. Ho hum.

Quirt and the outlaws are also pursued by the law here, led by a very old and grizzled Marshall, played by a very old and grizzled Tommy Lee Lones. Jones is 80 years-old, and he looks it. He also displays about as much energy as an ailing 80 year-old. That being said, it still was a lot of fun seeing Jones back on the big screen again. In fact, I can safely say that Jones, even at 80 and rather slow, was the best part of this movie.

Zachary Levi is okay as Quirt, but he looks like he’s just dying to start blabbering comical commentary a la Shazam, the role he played in the recent SHAZAM superhero movies.

Director Julio Quintana films Meg Fraser as Penny with her bright blue eyes with a Disney princess aura throughout. So yes, she is beautiful and wholesome to look at, but the movie doesn’t once dare to generate any sexual chemistry between Fraser and Levi. If these two were to get married, you could be sure that they’d be sleeping in separate beds, a la 1950s American television shows.

Jean Louisa Kelly who years ago shined as the troubled teen in the John Candy classic comedy UNCLE BUCK (1989), is respectable here as Irene the matriarch of the family, but every other word she utters is about how to live a good Christian life.

Neal McDonough shows up as main baddie Laredo, the latest in a series of ineffective villains played by McDonough. It’s reached the point where when you see McDonough show up to play a villain, you know he’s going to fail.

The screenplay by Kevin M. Townsend, Christopher Tuffin, and Jaime Hernandez is too busy spouting on about Christian values and prayer to pay any attention to character development and story structure and conflict.

The ending to this one is never in doubt. Like a Hallmark movie, you know the bad guys will lose, the main couple will not only prevail, but they’ll get together and live happily ever after.

Even the shoot outs in this one lack luster. There is no suspense, no excitement, and no payoff at the end because it’s all so predictable.

It’s no surprise that I saw this one in an empty theater. That’s right. I had my own private showing since no one else bothered to pay money to see this movie.

The other problem I have with “faith-based” stories is that they get the faith part all wrong. There’s a reason it’s called faith. That reason is in the real world, God/Jesus/whomever doesn’t show up in the flesh and take charge. You’ve got to believe without proof because nine times out of ten, it seems like prayers are not answered.

But in a movie like ANGEL AND THE BADMAN, the characters are all praying for things like changes of heart amongst the villains, and in some cases, this happens. The characters believe that going to church and praying means that things will work out in the end. There’s nothing wrong with believing this. But stories like this only speak in terms of fantasy, because here, prayers do work 100 % and the characters do get everything they want. It’s exactly this kind of storytelling that turns people away from faith, because they feel alienated. Why don’t I have a seat at the table? Why aren’t my prayers answered? Why is God ignoring me?

A smarter faith-based story would show prayers not working out the way a character expects, and then that character’s faith would be tested. If that character keeps their faith, then that’s a story about faith.

I was largely bored watching ANGEL AND THE BADMAN because while the characters here are all amiable, in terms of a western about an outlaw getting a second chance at life, it was pretty dull because it was clear from the outset that this second chance for redemption was pretty much a no brainer.

If you like wholesome Hallmark-type movies, you’ll enjoy ANGEL AND THE BADMAN. But if you’re a fan of movie westerns like me, you’ll no doubt be bored with it all.

I give it 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

OTHER MOMMY (2026) – Horror Movie Awful from Start to Finish

Excuse me, where’s the monster with all the bandages?

Ohhh, this isn’t OTHER MUMMY? It’s OTHER MOMMY. I see.

You know, there are some movie titles that just don’t do the movie any favors. I’m sorry, but OTHER MOMMY? It has ridiculousness written all over it. I crack up every time I see it. It sounds like a bad sitcom.

Anyway, the title is the least of this one’s problems.

OTHER MOMMY (2026) is a new horror movie by director Rob Savage, the man who brought us THE BOOGEYMAN (2023) a few years back, a rather lame horror movie that didn’t work all that well for me. OTHER MOMMY is worse, unfortunately.

There’s a good story in there somewhere, and that’s because the screenplay by Nathan Elston is based on the novel Incidents Around the House by Josh Malerman, and so once again here we have an example of superior source material done in my a muddled screenplay.

In a nutshell, OTHER MOMMY is the story of an 8 year-old girl named Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark) whose imaginary friend takes on the image of her mother, and it isn’t just an imaginary friend, but an evil entity which wants to enter Bela’s heart in order to switch places with her. It wants to become human, and it wants to send Bela into the demon world. And it wants this because words superimposed on the screen before the opening credits inform the audience that human life is coveted by demons who desperately want to become human because being human is so precious. It is? Humans are awesome? I guess demons don’t watch the nightly news.

Anyway, once Bela’s parents, Mommy (Jessica Chastain) and Daddo (Jay Duplass) discover what’s going on and that their daughter is in danger, it’s up to them to protect her, something which in this movie they’re not very good at.

The movie even has a decent subtext, where the demon entices Bela that if she allows it to switch places with her, she’ll be safe and pain free, because in the real world, her heart is about to be broken by her parents, who are clearly having issues, and Bela sees this. And so, the demon’s offer begins to look better and better as the movie goes along, as Bela sees her parents approaching divorce mode.

This storyline is the best part of OTHER MOMMY. Unfortunately, the way director Rob Savage decides to tell this story, is the worst part.

Let’s start with how this one begins. We immediately meet the three central family members, and in a sequence given away in the movie’s trailers, we watch Bela have an uncomfortable encounter with her “other mommy” before Daddo (who comes up with these names?) rushes in when there’s a fire on top of the stove. As Daddo comforts Bela, he sees the Other Mommy with her body bizarrely contorted and as he screams aloud in fright, the title sequence blares out OTHER MOMMY in a way that can only be described as over the top and comical. For a moment, I thought I was watching a parody.

The fact that the parents learn about Other Mommy immediately was somewhat refreshing. However, how they handle everything afterwards is ludicrous and unbelievable. They clearly win The Worst Movie Parents of the Year Award as they fail in everything they attempt to do to protect Bela.

This movie lost me from the moment those bizarre opening titles blasted onto the screen, and things only got worse.

The performances don’t help.

Jessica Chastain, a fine actress who has delivered many notable performances, plays the most annoying mother in a movie I’ve seen in a while. She’s cold and distant at first, clearly not happy in her marriage, clearly not happy being a mother, and then of course, late in the game, has a complete change of heart, a transition that is so unbelievable it makes one think the title of this one should have been FAKE MOMMY. Chastain has also starred in her share of genre movies, from IT: CHAPTER TWO (2019) to CRIMSON PEAK (2015). This is probably the first time I have ever not enjoyed a performance by Jessica Chastain.

Jay Duplass is even worse as Daddo. Most of the time the guy is excessively syrupy sweet- no wonder Mommy is no longer in love with him. He is supposed to be funny, but his humor misfires throughout. The screenplay doesn’t help. When things are at their bleakest, late in the game, he’s cracking jokes and throwing a party to “lighten the mood.” WTF? The biggest surprise in this one is why little Bela doesn’t say yes to the demon’s offer immediately! I can’t imagine being stuck in this family as a kid.

Scary? Nope. It seems director Rob Savage wouldn’t know a scary sequence if it bit him in the ass.

Chastain does do double duty here as she plays Other Mommy as well, but what constitutes as frightening for her are long cringy smiles and repeatedly asking, “Can I go into your heart?” before she gives way to ridiculous special effects. The only reaction the scare/gore effects in this one got from the audience I saw it with was laughter.

Karen Allen, famous for playing Marion in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981), plays Bela’s grandmother, but sadly, it’s yet another performance in this movie that doesn’t go anywhere.

The only positive about this movie is a nice performance by little Arabella Olivia Clark as Bela. She’s good, and that’s about the only thing that’s good about this one.

The ending, where it’s actually little Bela who takes charges, is also a letdown.

The entire movie is a letdown, mostly because there is so much potential here with a story about tempting a little girl to say yes to a demon because her parents are dysfunctional, but this movie can’t even get this right.

OTHER MOMMY is a snooze from start to finish.

As I sat there stuck in the theater suffering through this one, I couldn’t help but wish I was watching an OTHER MOVIE instead.

I give it one star.

-END-

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

PICTURE OF THE DAY: HORROR OF DRACULA (1958)

With all the hype recently of the upcoming 4K release of HORROR OF DRACULA (1958) on Blu-ray and at select theaters on October 27, my favorite Dracula movie of all time has been on my mind. I’m not sure how limited the theatrical release will be, but I would absolutely love to see this one on the big screen.

So, today’s Picture of The Day comes from this Hammer masterpiece.

One of my favorite parts of HORROR OF DRACULA is Terence Fisher’s direction and the overall cinematography. Everything in this movie looks amazing, and the horror scenes are played out to full effect.

Take the image above, for example. This is the scene where Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) and Arthur Holmwood (Michael Gough) are standing guard outside the house, awaiting the arrival of Dracula, in an effort to protect Mina, but what they don’t know, is that Dracula is already inside the house. And so, while they’re standing around outside, Mina exits her bedroom, and with a jolt of powerful James Bernard music, there is Dracula (Christopher Lee) standing at the base of the stairs, about to make his way to Mina’s bedroom. It is shot beautifully by Terence Fisher, as so much of this movie is, and because there is so much to like about HORROR OF DRACULA, the way Fisher filmed this one is rarely talked about.

This scene is a classic, thanks to Fisher’s direction. From the moment we see Dracula waiting at the base of the stairs, which is a shock because the audience, like Van Helsing and Holmwood, believe he’s on his way to the house and not inside, to his dominant predator style walk up those stairs, to the way he slams the door shut behind him, which then cuts to the interior of the bedroom, for the very sensual and horrific vampire bite he gives Mina (Melissa Stribling), to the way the scene ends, with a cutaway to a screeching owl, which again surprises the audience because they expect a scream from Mina.

The shot here is framed perfectly, with the detailed set of the Holmwood home interior in the background, the vertical beams from the staircase in the foreground, and Dracula in the center. So much detail was given to the sets in this movie, from the props to the floors. Look closely at this photo, and there is just so much to see. And don’t even get me started on the way Terence Fisher used color schemes in this movie as well as in the many other movies he directed for Hammer. Here we see green, black, and gold, and it’s all beautifully balanced.

The other item of note in this picture is Dracula’s cape. HORROR OF DRACULA is the only Hammer Christopher Lee Dracula movie where the interior of his cape is black. Starting with DRACULA: PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1966), Hammer switched to a Dracula cape with a red interior, most likely for the obvious reason that red calls to mind, blood. It’s a decent look, but I’ve always preferred the all black version seen here in HORROR OF DRACULA.

There’s just something about the all black Dracula cape/costume in HORROR OF DRACULA that, like the rest of the movie, resonates so well. Sometimes the red cape plays out too over the top, like a caricature almost, but the all black is deadly, menacing, and even a bit sexy, just like Christopher Lee. This costume matches his Dracula perfectly.

It also contrasts wonderfully with Dracula’s white coffin in this movie, another stroke of brilliance by Terence Fisher.

HORROR OF DRACULA is coming to Blu-ray and even some movie theaters on October 27, 2026, in 4K and uncut, supposedly the definitive version, which was found recently in a Warner Brothers vault in Los Angeles, and is supposedly more comprehensive than the version discovered in Japan several years ago.

While we wait, enjoy the image above, and savor the cinematography of one of the greatest Dracula and horror movies ever made.

-END-

STRANGLEHOLD (2026) – Quirky Comedy Crime Thriller Surprisingly Smart

There is no “they.”

That’s one of the best lines in STRANGLEHOLD (2026), and it’s said by Ron Perlman’s mobster character, in a movie that is billed as an action-comedy crime thriller. And while there are plenty of laughs throughout, and a crime, and plenty of gun toting action, the movie also has a surprisingly effective subtext about the state of life in the United States these days and just who is to blame.

Bailey (Ashley Benson) works as a stripper in a small town in Arkansas, barely getting by, as she lives in a mobile home with her drunk husband Tim (Jake Lacy) and their one-year-old daughter. Tim drinks nonstop, and he can’t even hold a job working as a greeter at the local department store. Tim is also a gun enthusiast, a self-proclaimed former military vet who takes his military training seriously, even though he’s reminded by Bailey that he only served in the National Guard and struggled to do even that. But Tim believes that the government is out to get them, from ordering people to get vaccines to giving money to foreign countries rather than helping Americans at home. His points, in spite of his being a loser of a character, reasonate and hit home, which is what I liked most about this movie, that its screenplay by Chandler Duke, Billington Garrett, and director Clark Duke tackles some real life issues and in spite of its dumb Southern boy humor is smart enough to know that the answers are gray and not black and white.

Bailey just wants to buy her little daughter presents for Christmas, and so she asks her jerk of a boss Junior (Justin Long) to either give her extra shifts or perhaps an advance before Christmas. He says no to both. In fact, he even deducts from her most recent paycheck because she’s been arriving to work late recently. Besides, he tells her, she makes most of her money in tips, and when Bailey protests, Junior tells her she’d get more tips if she stopped thinking of herself as a dancer and started acting like a stripper by adding more sex moves to her dances, saying she’d get bigger tips that way. As it stands, the only way to earn more money from Junior is to engage in sex acts with him. Yup, he’s a sleazebag.

When Bailey learns of private party at the strip club with high paying clients, most of them mobsters, she asks to work at the party, but again, Junior tells her no. Completely frustrated, she gives in and gets drunk with her husband Tim, and at this point comes up with the idea that they can rob the strip club the night of the party, which will give Tim the opportunity to put his military training skills to good use, an opportunity Tim jumps at.

And so Bailey and Tim become an unlikely pair of robbers. With assault rifles in hand, they invade the club and hold everyone hostage, including the number one mobster in Arkansas, Junior’s father, Roger (Ron Perlman) as they plan to steal the huge stash of money inside the club’s safe. But somebody presses the silent alarm, and the club’s security staff, a hodgepodge of gun toting local idiots, arrive in their pickup trucks wielding their guns, and they surround the club, erroneously believing it has been taken over by terrorists.

The first half of STRANGLEHOLD is quirky and funny. As it introduces its characters, the writing is sharp and on target. I laughed a lot early on. The humor, especially as we meet the oddball crew of rural idiots, calls to mind the work of the Farrelly brothers, and as the plot grows darker, the film channels another set of filmmaker brothers, the Coens. That’s because in the movie’s second half, as Bailey and Tim attempt to rob the club, things get a tad more serious. That being said, the movie never loses its comedic edge, and the script remains funny all the way through.

But with trigger happy Tim inside the club full of mobsters, and the hillbilly security team on the outside, the stage is set for quite the bloodbath. The body count is high in this one. Yet the script remains smart.

One of the best moments features Ron Perlman’s Roger, as he listens to Tim go on and on about how bad he has it, which is why they are robbing the club, because society has taken everything away from ordinary Americans and keeps taking away, in effect saying, “they don’t care about us anymore!’ To which Roger responds with the line, “There is no they!” Roger goes on to say that he knows poverty and grew up poor, but he didn’t let that stop him. He said he worked hard for everything he got, and he worked his way to the top, because, as he says in his big macho moment, “I’m a man!” Adding that he didn’t whine and complain like Tim.

Roger also has the keen observation saying the trouble with people nowadays is they may be poor, but they all have enough money for things like iPhones and Netflix. He then turns to Bailey and asks, “You have Netlfix?” She nods, and he quips, “Of course!” The implication being that Tim may know poverty, but with things like phones and movies, he’s not as miserable as he says he is.

This dialogue hearkens back to an earlier scene where Tim goes to the drugstore to buy a prescription med for his ailing young daughter and is shocked at its high price. The pharmacist explains that the generic brand is no longer available, and he has to pay this price for the name brand. He asks for a discount, and she tells him she understands his hardship, but she can’t. She then suggests that maybe he can put some of the things in his shopping basket back. The camera then shows us what’s in his basked, beer and video game accessories for him. He returns home with his beer and video game supplies, not the medicine, telling Bailey the price was too high to pay for. Which shows us not only the real-life frustrations of high prescription drug prices, but Tim’s decision to put himself first and his sick daughter last. Which speaks to Roger’s point later about weakness in character.

Ashley Benson is very good in the lead role as Bailey, and other than the drunken decision she makes to rob the strip club, she’s the one character in the movie with a head on her shoulders and a conscience, as she balks at their decision once the bullets start flying and her friends inside the club start dying, but of course by then it’s too late.

Jake Lacy is sufficiently annoying as paranoid hubby Tim. Lacy played a similarly annoying character on the TV show THE WHITE LOTUS (2021). He makes Tim an interesting character. He’s terribly selfish and a terrible father and husband, but his points about not being able to catch a break in this country in the here and now hit home, even though he doesn’t do anything to make his own breaks.

STRANGLEHOLD also has a strong supporting cast. Ron Perlman doesn’t show up until the second half of the movie, but he chews up the scenery as Roger, the powerful mobster. Justin Long, a terrific actor with a ton of credits who started years ago in movies like GALAXY QUEST (1999) and most recently appeared in the horror movies WEAPONS (2025) and BARBARIANS (2022), knocks it out of the park as the annoying jerk of a club owner, Junior.

David Arquette plays a goofy DJ at the club, and Chandler Duke, who co-wrote the screenplay, plays Leon, the half-wit employee who leads the security team surrounding the club. Duke nails the dumb and dumber side of the character but also captures a lot of sympathy as the beat upon character.

Director Clark Duke keeps this one energetic throughout. The humor is on point during the movie’s first half, and once the robbery begins, things get real dark real fast as people we got to know early on start dying, and there’s a sense of unpredictability which works really well here. I wasn’t really sure how this one was going to play out.

The movie also does a really good job mixing humor with horror. Tim’s truck won’t start unless he passes a breathalyzer inside the vehicle, and both he and Bailey are too drunk to make it work, so they use their baby daughter. The scene where they coax her to breathe into the device is a funny one, replaced immediately by horror as Tim says they must take their daughter with them to the robbery because they will need her to start the truck again when they get away, and once there, they leave her inside the truck, right in the middle of the fierce climactic gun battle.

And this final sequence is quite the bloodbath. The movie doesn’t skimp on the violence.

STRANGLEHOLD is a movie that isn’t on a lot of people’s radar, but this comedy crime thriller really worked for me. It’s got fine performances by a veteran cast, and best of all, it has a really smart screenplay that is full of sharp humor and some surprising social commentary that at first glance seems like a playbook for conservative unrest in the nation, but upon a closer look reveals a much wiser take on what’s wrong with the country these days, a mix of poor economic conditions and poor human choices that speaks clearly to the notion that what’s wrong with the nation isn’t “them” but “us,” as people need to take ownership of their lives in spite of the odds stacked against them.

Then again, as Junior says earlier and Bailey repeats later, sometimes you just get f*cked.

I give it three 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