So often when filmmakers attempt to remake a beloved niche genre film or a cult classic, you wind up with a product that may, on the surface, resemble the earlier version, but that misses the point completely. Or one that doesn’t seem to grasp what people love about the original. Writer/director Macon Blair’s (Green Room) new incarnation of Troma Entertainment favorite The Toxic Avenger is not one of those movies.
Wilderness survival tales, sagas of human endurance in the face of overwhelming, unrelenting odds, are common fodder for movies. But like other oft-visited genres, they can be the staging grounds for moving, powerful stories. (It feels like I’ve written a lot about this lately when it comes to post-apocalyptic films doing fresh, interesting things.) There’s plenty of room for thrills and edge of your seat tension, and they’re perfect showcases for human resilience, the triumph of man over nature, and that sort of thing. It also helps that they tend to have relatively small casts. And into this fray comes Hugo Keijzer’s directorial debut, The Occupant.
I say this every time I review one of his movies, but watching Ma Dong-seok (aka Don Lee) clobber dudes is one of modern action cinema’s purest pleasures. What director Lim Dae-hee’s new film, Holy Night: Demon Hunters, proposes is, what if, instead of dudes, there were demons, and Ma punched them in the face, too? That sounds like a match made in heaven. Or hell, as the case may be.
If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. So goes the well-worn saying, so goes the story of Donna (Dana Namerode). A talented pianist, the diagnosis of an aggressive, highly localized cancer means the only way to save her life is to amputate her arm. As her days become a series of indifferent doctors and callous support groups, the prospect of losing everything she’s devoted her life to leads her to accept an offer from Sam (Johnny Whitworth, Empire Records), a mysterious (sketchy) scientist who claims he can cure her. What initially looks like an immediate, miraculous cure turns into something much more sinister. And occasionally quite gooey.
When Anna (Alexandra McVicker), a young trans woman, leaves her shitty home town to start fresh, she learns you can run from your past, but you can’t get away from yourself, and finds plenty of new messes in the big city. Like vampires. 21-year-old filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay’s sixth feature, The Serpent’s Skin, uses this familiar premise as a jumping off point to do something a bit different.
It’s time once again for one of our favorite events of the year, Fantasia Fest, also known as the world’s largest genre film festival. Running from Wednesday, July 16 through Sunday, August 3, the schedule is, as always, bursting at the seams with all manner of horror, action, sci-fi, and other assorted cinematic goodness.
Music video and TV veteran R.T. Thorne directs his feature debut, 40 Acres. In the apocalyptic wake of a fungal pandemic, new civil war, and sweeping famine, a family, led by no-nonsense former soldier Hailey (Danielle Deadwyler), must protect their fortified farm from threats within and without. Including potential cannibal invasion.
Movies are great. 2024 was a great year for movies. And you know what? 2025 is shaping up to be yet another amazing year for film. Let’s be honest, they always are. I already talked about my favorite movies of last year, but since the calendar just turned over, it’s high time to look ahead to what’s coming. Following that logic, here are my 50 (ish) most-anticipated movies of 2025.
There’s a great deal to admire in the latest rendition of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 horror classic (and unofficial Dracula adaptation) Nosferatu, the long-simmering passion project from Robert Eggers. It’s exquisitely mounted down to the most granular detail, features several fantastic, committed performances, and is stunning to look at. But for all there is to appreciate, it fails to move the needle or elicit much of any reaction beyond a shrug.
Elevation, the new sci-fi adventure from The Adjustment Bureau director and Bourne Ultimatum writer George Nolfi, is fine. That’s the most accurate way to put it. It’s a solidly executed creature feature with an intriguing if underdeveloped hook, charismatic leads, moderate tension, and a crisp visual style. It gets right in, does its business, and wraps things up in less than 90 minutes. Is it thought provoking, innovative, or particularly memorable? No. But it’s entertaining and compelling enough if that’s all you’re after.
Isaac Ezban’s Parvulos: Hijos del Apocalips is very literal in its title. These are actual children of the apocalypse. Salvador (Farid Escalante Correa), Oliver (Leonardo Cervantes), and Benji (Mateo Ortega Casillas) are three brothers, the oldest, Sal, a young teen, surviving on their own after a virus causes the end of the world. They do all the typical apocalyptic things, scrounge food, do their best to get through every day, and tend to the dark, sinister secret lurking in their basement.
Have you ever looked up at the night sky, seen a falling star, pointed, and screamed, “Witch”? If so, or if you’re a fan of eerie, modern desert folk horror, you may want to put Falling Stars, the first feature from directors Gabriel Bienczycki and Richard Karpala, on your radar.
In the wake of the Rapture, a devout religious enclave has forsworn the “sin of speech,” living a wordless existence in relative isolation. (Their whistling, however, does feel a bit like cheating at times.) When a young woman the credits tell us is named Azrael (Samara Weaving, Ready or Not) is set to be sacrificed to zombie-like creatures that inhabit the woods, she attempts to escape with her lover (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Candyman) and must fight to avoid being torn limb from limb.
Stop me if you’ve heard this. Five college friends—an alpha male, an outdoorsy type, a tomboy, a hot girl, and a nerd. A spooky, remote cabin in the woods. (Actually, a spooky, remote Dutch villa in an Indonesian jungle, but the idea is the same.) A cemetery. A well. An old caretaker. No cell service. No power. Things get weird and people start dying. That’s customary horror fare. But from this basic framework, The Draft director Yusron Fuadi tweaks the formula in clever, inventive ways and crafts a fun, fresh take on what the movie calls “cheap Indonesian horror films,” and the oft-repeated tropes of the genre across national boundaries.
“Can we speak ill of the living before it’s too late?” asks Magpie (Emma Appleton) in writer/director Dean Puckett’s The Severed Sun. It’s certainly one of those situations where if people had taken a moment to talk it out, many if not all of the more unfortunate events of the film could have been avoided. But then we wouldn’t have this moody, engaging, occasionally quite gory, if a bit spare entry into the folk horror canon.
I'm a sucker for any movie that's going along fine but then is all... "and now there are wolves." (Insert any variety of killer animal.) The hook here, in Adam MacDonald’s Out Come the Wolves, is the wolves, but that’s not really the point. The eponymous predators don’t show up until relatively late in the game—you know it’s coming, it’s right there in the title and prominently featured in all the marketing—but things are already harrowing and conflict-riddled enough by the time our furry pals appear.
If it looks like an Alien movie, walks like an Alien movie, and murders you in space with a giant armor-plated extraterrestrial killing machine, then it’s probably an Alien movie. And by god, Evil Dead director Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus is an Alien movie. We’ve got xenomorphs, we’ve got face-huggers, there’s a chest-burster, corporate malfeasance, capitalistic overreach, acid blood, synthetics up to no good, and all the expected bells and baubles.
Birds sure are creepy little fuckers, aren’t they? Dinosaur-looking sons of bitches. At least that’s what Cuckoo would have you believe. Though Luz writer/director Tilman Singer’s latest off-kilter horror offering definitely keeps you guessing as to the why of the lingering avian motif, it ultimately pays off in wild ways, taking unusual paths to get there.
When you hear about a DIY Estonian horror-musical that took the filmmaker (Sander Maran served as director, writer, editor, cinematographer, songwriter, and probably more roles) a decade to make, you can’t help but be curious. And Chainsaws Were Singing is all of that and so, so much more. This is a bizarre, wild time that goes way, way out in the wilderness and is something fans of movies like Cannibals: The Musical and Hundreds of Beavers need to check out.
19-year-old Australian dynamo Alice Maio Mackay already has a hell of a roster of low-to-no-budget horror movies under her belt with the likes of T-Blockers, So Vam, and Bad Girl Boogey, among others. And now she’s back to throw her hat in the holiday horror ring with Carnage for Christmas, a bloody fun yuletide romp that’s definitely going into my regular seasonal rotation.
