Monthly Archives: July 2025
You’ll Never Go in the Onsen Again
Hotspring Sharkattack
by Matt Weiner
Japan’s beloved onsen (natural hot springs) are the site of grisly shark attacks in the town of Atsumi. A weary police chief butts heads with the town mayor hellbent on welcoming as many tourists as possible, even as the body count rises and outside shark experts and influencers alike converge on the town to solve the mystery (or profit from it on social media).
Sound familiar? While writer and director Morihito Inoue localizes the story to his home country, the main beats are so load-bearing that Hotspring Sharkattack is less a Jaws homage and more of an extended parody.
Chief Denbei Tsuka (Kiyobumi Kaneko) daydreams about his impending retirement from the Atsumi police. Billed as “the Monaco of the East,” the scenic town is a tourist draw for their many onsen. And the number of sightseers is about to grow exponentially with the opening of a towering new spa resort, a project that feckless town mayor Kanichi Mangan (Takuya Fujimura) deems too big to fail no matter how many bodies start to pile up.
The police suspect these aren’t typical shark attacks, but it’s not until marine biologist Mayumi Kose (Yuu Nakanishi) arrives to help investigate that they figure out what these special sharks are up to. It involves cartilage, pipes and some scientific handwaving… but it’s also not important. It’s all exactly as silly as you want from a movie called Hotspring Sharkattack.
The actors treat these ridiculous monologues with just the right level of dignity to sell the lines. The bigger issue is that, between the film’s brisk runtime and over-reliance on early PlayStation special effects, Hotspring Sharkattack comes dangerously close to looking like a late-night Syfy throwaway. And not one of the better ones.
Thankfully, by the time Mangan and Kose team up—with a little help from a silent, mostly shirtless guardian with godlike powers nicknamed Macho, because why not?—Inoue has reached deeper into his bag of low-budget tricks. The CGI sharks are still there, but so too are whimsical practical effects and miniatures. These moments of delight are a much better fit with the film’s tone, and it’s unfortunate that just about the only element not borrowed from Jaws is the understanding that you don’t need to show all your special effects if they aren’t working well.
Inoue’s earnest love of the source material and infectious humor go a long way toward pulling the film back from the direct-to-cable edge. But there’s a fine line between a B-movie that earns its status and a movie that is simply bad. And much like a cartilaginous predator that has learned to strike from any puddle of water (spoiler, if that’s the sort of thing you’re concerned about when it comes to a mutant shark attack movie), the movie never fully escapes that threat.
Vampire Blues
Abraham’s Boys
by Hope Madden
The problem with crafting a feature length film from a short story is that, often, the story’s too short. Filmmakers need to pad, and that can be tough because if the story needed more, likely the writer—certainly a writer as strong as Joe Hill—would have realized that.
But it can be done. Hill’s The Black Phone—an incredibly creepy short—benefitted from a number of changes as it leapt from page to screen. Director Scott Dickerson, who co-wrote the screenplay with regular collaborator C. Robert Cargill, added complexity and a strong B-story to enrich Hill’s original tale.
In adapting Hill’s short Abraham’s Boys, filmmaker Natasha Kermani (Lucky) keeps the core ideas intact but alters everything in the orbit of our three main characters: Dr. Abraham Van Helsing (Titus Welliver, solid), his oldest son Max (Brady Hepner), and young Rudy (Judah Mackey). The family lives, along with delicate mother Mina (Jocelin Donahue, Last Stop in Yuma County), in the as-yet isolated California desert.
Mina is but a distant memory in Hill’s writing, so her presence allows the film to round out the family dynamic. Kermani also adds railroad builders, which deepens the pool of potential victims, but also hints at Van Helsing’s paranoia when he and his family are not isolated from the rest of the world.
Why so paranoid? Like the short story, the film raises suspicions concerning Abraham’s reasoning and behavior.
Kermani’s film delivers on horror, bloody and emotional, in a way the short does not. Dreamy sequences bring depth to the inner conflict haunting Max, the film’s main focus. And none of Kermani’s additions subtract from the prickly family dynamic that was the soul of Hill’s tale.
Hepner, who had a small part in The Black Phone, struggles to carry Abraham’s Boys. It’s his arc that defines the story, but the performance is little more than a stiff spine and a pout.
The balance of the cast fares better, but bringing Mina into the story complicates what, in Hill’s tale, was a very simple premise. Her talk of having seen Dracula, of having his voice in her head, muddies the plot in ways Kermani never clarifies. The mixed message weakens the climax a bit, but thanks to the slow-boil atmosphere and Welliver’s brooding turn, all is not lost.
Killer Neighborhood
Push
by Hope Madden
From the moment Push holds on the “for sale” sign in front of an isolated Michigan mansion, co-writers/co-directors David Charbonier and Justin Douglas Powell proclaim their inspirations. The Craven Road property, for sale by Hitch & Wan Real Estate, is probably not the house you want.
Will the mansion be haunted outright, a la James Wan’s The Conjuring? Or will its ghosts be all in realtor Natalie’s (Alicia Sanz) mind, like Hitchcock’s Rebecca? Or is there something more corporeal to fear, a la Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left?
The filmmakers have set a high bar, and though their film doesn’t entirely clear it, Push does deliver an often effective little thriller.
The year is 1993 and Natalie, a very pregnant, recently widowed Mexican transplant peddling real estate in Michigan, finds herself trapped in the mansion she’s trying to sell. The sprawling, remote property is on the market because of the murder of its previous owners. Maybe that’s why only one guy (Raúl Castillo) shows up for the open house.
Cinematographer Daniel Katz’s floating camera is like a ghost warning you to pay attention. Both filmmakers and both leads amplify the atmospheric tension. One character is the picture of vulnerability, the other, a silent and brutal menace.
Push offers next to nothing in terms of motivation or location backstory. We know enough about Natalie to understand her arc, but the situation and how it came to be is forever a mystery. That can work—people step into unexplained horrors every day. That moment when you realize you’ve willingly put yourself in a perilous situation can deliver revelatory thrills.
Both Sanz and Castillo are up to that challenge, but the script sometimes is not. The conveniences and cliches pile up, and suspension of disbelief is strained to breaking.
It’s interesting to circle back to that for sale sign because in choosing not to clearly commit to a path—psychological, supernatural, or brutal—Push limits its impact.
Be Loud
Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore
by Rachel Willis
In 1986, Marlee Matlin won the Academy Award for her performance in the film Children of a Lesser God. Nearly three decades later, she remained the only Deaf actor to win an Oscar. This, as well as Matlin’s trailblazing career, is the focus of director Shoshannah Stern’s documentary, Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore.
Stern herself is also Deaf, and there are many wonderful moments when she and Matlin (as well as Stern with other Deaf actors) converse on screen without sound. The film makes extensive use of subtitles and closed captioning, but if a hearing audience member were to simply watch the two communicate on screen it’s a good example of how a Deaf person may feel when surrounded by hearing people who may forget to include them in conversation.
This is something Matlin addresses, as she was the only Deaf member of her family. It is also a reminder that this sort of exclusion can lead to significant language deprivation for individuals with hearing impairment. This is a critical issue that the documentary touches on when speaking to Matlin about some of the situations in which she was unable to name her experiences.
Like the 2000 documentary, Sound and Fury, Matlin and others are quick to point out that they are not limited in their abilities. It’s the world around them that tries to force them into a box where their “disability” is a problem to be solved not a difference to be celebrated.
The bulk of the documentary focuses on Matlin’s career and role as an advocate for the Deaf community. Closed captioning, something modern audiences may take for granted, was once a rarity. Matlin’s efforts, including a hearing before Congress, ensured that closed captioning would be a given moving forward.
There isn’t a dull moment in this documentary. Stern expertly weaves Matlin’s career and activism into an overall conversation about the needs of Deaf people, and the ways in which we can all do better moving forward. It’s certainly a film worth watching.
Undocumented Alien Thrashes Billionaire
Superman
by Hope Madden and George Wolf
James Gunn’s brand of humor is so sincere—never snarky, never brooding and mysterious—that he seemed a good fit for Superman, the most sincere of all the superheroes. Still, we were skeptical. Can something as wholesome as Superman be relevant in a time more rife with corruption and swampy with cynicism than any in modern history? And he has a dog?!
Yes, it turns out Superman (David Corenswet) and Gunn’s brand of sincerity is exactly what we need in the face of all this ugliness. And honest to God, by Act 3, we even loved Crypto the dog.
Gunn ‘s script wisely skips the origin story, quickly catching us up via onscreen text and dropping us in the snow with a superhero already battling his toughest opponent. That foe may look like a supervillain, but really Superman’s enemy is every human being’s enemy: greed.
Carving out yet another fine performance in a career littered with them, Nicholas Hoult delivers a searing, self-aware turn as Lex Luthor, the billionaire tech blowhard and would-be king. Though the character is clearly patterned after some real-life supervillainy, Hoult’s performance is all the more unnerving for its believability. And even when Gunn saddles him with some overwritten speeches, Hoult’s talent elevates the moment beyond cartoon theatrics.
Corenswet is a delightfully earnest Big Blue, offset nicely by a more cynical and wonderfully physical Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) and a trio of metahuman helpers, the Justice Gang: Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion), Hawkgirl (Cleveland’s own Isabela Merced), and Mr. Terrific (a scene stealing Edi Gathegi and his statement-making jacket).
Act 1 takes a little while to find its groove, but the slow start is easy to forget once the story elements begin to gel. The social commentary is in your face, pointed and matter-of-fact relatable, but doesn’t sink to preachiness or finger wagging. And while it is consistently funny, the film never makes humor as much of a focus as Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy series, opting instead for smaller, more organic asides.
Of course, there’s an added bonus for those of us here in Ohio, as Cleveland makes a pretty spectacular Metropolis, even when it’s taking a beating. Filming specifically for IMAX, Gunn and cinematographer Henry Braham make the upgrade a worthy and welcome piece of the immersive world-building.
The biggest weakness here – other than kryptonite – is Gunn’s comfort with some unnatural dialog and overly detailed speeches of exposition. And ironically, it’s the level of entertainment that surrounds these moments that causes them to land as unnecessary and curious.
But more often than not, Gunn’s storytelling choices pay off. We know the character pretty well by now, but this Superman/Clark Kent is unlike any we’ve seen before. Gunn and Corenswet make him more vulnerable and more human than ever, sometimes doubting himself but never doubting his mission to do good.
Remember the hero’s motto of “truth, justice and the American way?” Superman does. And even though those words are never spoken, the film finds a cinematic joy in reminding us how those ideals can be twisted until they’re barely recognizable.
Lord knows humanity needs a win right now. Thanks to a man and his dog, we get one.
De”FIN”itive
Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story
by George Wolf
You may have heard Jaws celebrated its fiftieth anniversary last month. The celebrations and remembrances, the memes and mementos have been joyous fun, reminding us of a landmark film that changed the landscape of the movies.
And now, like the fashionably late party guest everyone was waiting for, comes Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story. Streaming concurrently on Hulu, Disney + and the National Geographic channel, the film serves up a boatload of BTS goodness that fans will wish was twice as big as the 88-minute running time.
At the heart of director Laurent Bouzereau’s deep dive is the time spent with director Steven Spielberg. His approach to adapting the book for the screen, his tales of how the shoot went months behind schedule, how there was real doubt that it could even be completed, and the PTSD that followed him into his filmmaking future are all completely captivating. Looking back, he still seems amazed that they pulled it off, and Bouzereau finds an effective contrast between Spielberg remembering what went wrong and famous fans such as Quentin Tarantino, Jordan Peele, Guillermo del Toro, Steven Soderbergh and more lavishing praise about what went right.
The Martha’s Vineyard location and its unique citizenry become characters themselves, but of course its Bruce the mechanical shark that always steals the show – for better or worse. Fifty years later, you’re glad that CGI wasn’t around in the summer of 1974, as Bruce’s “less is more” performance still holds up every time.
From the cast members to the score to the USS Indianapolis monolog to the film’s effect on studio production, marketing and even shark conservation, Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story covers just about every angle you’re hoping for. It is the perfect exclamation point to this month long birthday celebration.
I just wonder why the “fin” in Definitive isn’t capitalized.
I don’t find that funny. I don’t find that funny at all.
Never mind, then.
Screening Room: Jurassic World: Rebirth, 40 Acres, Old Guard 2, Heads of State & More
Fright Club: Best Horror Movies, First Half of 2025
It is not that time!
It is! It most definitely is time to celebrate how great the first half of 2025 has been for horror. Indeed, easily the best film of the year so far (and a tough contender for the balance of the year) is a vampire movie! Here are our favorite horror films of the first half of 2025.
10. Dead Mail
Filmmakers Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy’s thriller Dead Mail builds on a wildly unrealistic concept: smalltown post offices with super-secure back rooms where pains are taken and spies may be accessed to solve mysteries behind lost mail. And yet, their analog approach to this period piece gives it a true crime feel you never fully shake.
The bulk of the film is carried on John Fleck’s shoulders. As Trent, the seemingly harmless organ enthusiast who has a man trapped in his basement, Fleck’s delivers magnificent work. There’s a beautiful loneliness in his performance that makes the villainous Trent irredeemably sympathetic.
Filmmaker and cast investment pays off. Dead Mail is clever, intriguing and wholly satisfying little thriller.
9. Final Destination: Bloodlines
Final Destination: Bloodlines is the best since James Wong’s clever 2000 original, if not the best in the whole franchise. And the presence of genre beloved Tony Todd in his final role seals the emotional deal.
The Rube Goldberg of Death franchise boasts many clever, nasty kills and the sixth episode does not let us down. Smart, nutty and goretastic with some of the most impressive comic-beat editing of the year, the bloody mayhem in this film is giddy with its power.
Plus we all get to spend a few more minutes with Tony Todd.
8. Hood Witch
Co-writer/director Saïd Belktibia examines the muddy difference between a religion’s acceptable magic and harmful witchcraft. However similar the practice, the differentiator seems to be based primarily on whether a woman benefits.
Though Hood Witch is far more a drama/thriller than an outright horror film, it does follow a longstanding genre tradition of using witchcraft to point out religions’ hypocrisy and misogyny. But the filmmaker goes further, complicating characters by implicating capitalism as being equally dangerous—particularly to the desperate and easily manipulated—as religion.
Hood Witch is a tough watch, as misogyny and apathy play out in the film the same way they play out every miserable day, infecting each generation like a poison.
7. Companion
It’s not to say that writer/director Drew Hancock is saying anything new, exactly. Most of the ideas are borrowed, and even the look of Companion feels cribbed from more insightfully stylized films. But the way he puts these ideas and images into play and keeps them playing guarantees a mischievously, wickedly good time.
Lars and the Real Girl meets Revenge meets AI meets maybe twenty other movies, but damn if Hancock and this sharp ensemble doesn’t make it work. Turns out it’s kind of fun to be on the side of AI for a change.
6. Freaky Tales
Look, I’m not saying I didn’t expect someone to make a Sleepy-Floyd-as-a-ninja-assassin horror comedy. I am saying I didn’t expect it to be Boden and Fleck.
Eric “Sleepy” Floyd played thirteen years in the NBA, making the All Star team in 1987 as a member of the Golden State Warriors. Freaky Tales makes him the heroic centerpiece of a wild anthology that loves the late 80s, Oakland, and Nazis dying some horrible deaths.
Let’s party!
Buried under all this blood and camp, the film displays a genuine love of time, place and genre that you cannot ignore. These Freaky Tales are truly off the leash, usually in the best possible way.
5. Bring Her Back
Filmmakers Danny and Michael Philippou drew attention in 2022 for their wildly popular feature debut, Talk to Me. Before releasing the sequel, due out this August, the pair changes the game up with a different, but at least equally disturbing, look at grief.
It’s a slow burn, a movie that communicates dread brilliantly with its cinematography and pacing. But when Bring Her Back hits the gas, dude! Nastiness not for the squeamish! Especially if you have a thing about teeth, be warned. But the body horror always serves the narrative, deepening your sympathies even as it has you hiding your eyes.
Australia has a great habit of sending unsettling horror our way. The latest package from Down Under doesn’t disappoint.
4. The Monkey
Why is it that so many kids’ toys are creepy? Not that you should call The Monkey a toy. You should not, ever. Because this windup organ grinder monkey, with its red eyes and horrifyingly realistic teeth, is more of a furry, murder happy nightmare.
The film itself is a match made in horror heaven. Osgood Perkins (Longlegs, Gretel & Hansel, The Blackcoat’s Daughter) adapts and directs the short story by Stephen King about sibling rivalry and the unpredictability of death.
Perkins surrounds deliberately low energy leads with bizarre, colorful characters—even more colorful when they catch fire, explode, are disemboweled, etcetera. The film is laced with wonderful bursts of Final Destination-like bloodletting, as the Monkey’s executions are carried out via Rube Goldberg chain reactions that quickly become fun to anticipate.
Yes, fun. And funny.
3. Invader
Lean, mean and affecting, Mickey Keating’s take on the home invasion film wastes no time. In a wordless—though not soundless—opening, the filmmaker introduces an unhinged presence.
Immediately Keating sets our eyes and ears against us. His soundtrack frequently blares death metal, a tactic that emphasizes a chaotic, menacing mood the film never shakes. Using primarily handheld cameras from the unnerving opening throughout the entire film, the filmmaker maintains an anarchic energy, a sense of the characters’ frenzy and the endless possibility of violence.
Joe Swanberg, with limited screentime and even more limited dialog, crafts a terrifying image of havoc. His presence is perversely menacing, an explosion of rage and horror. Invader delivers a spare, nasty, memorable piece of horror in just over an hour. It will stick with you a while longer.
2. The Ugly Stepsister
Writer/director Emilie Blichfeldt infuses her feature debut with an impossible-to-ignore blast of sharp wit, subdued rage, and grotesque bodily horrors.
The Ugly Stepsister (Den stygge stesøsteren) is the latest new angle to a classic tale, but don’t expect it follow the trend of humanizing misunderstood villains. Blichfeldt makes sure there are plenty of bad guys and girls throughout this Norwegian Cinderella story, punctuated by grisly violence surprisingly close to what’s in the 17th Century French version of the fairy tale penned by Charles Perrault.
It is fierce, funny, gross and subversively defiant. But is one feature film enough to immediately put Blichfeldt on the watch list of cinema’s feminist hell raisers?
Yes. The shoe fits.
1. Sinners
More Teeth
Jurassic World: Rebirth
by Hope Madden
Every great creature feature from King Kong to Godzilla to Jaws to Jurassic Park and on and on understands one basic principle. The monster is not the problem. Human greed is the problem. Some monster movies are just better than others at telling that story.
It’s not a new notion to director Gareth Edwards, who riffed on it in Monsters (2010), Godzilla (2014), and The Creator (2023). For Jurassic World: Rebirth, he teams with writer David Koepp, who adapted Michael Crichton’s novel for Spielberg’s 1993 original. Given the sheer volume of callbacks in Rebirth, I’d say Koepp is pretty pleased with how that first one turned out.
Scarlett Johansson is an extraction specialist hired by Big Pharma in white linen, Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) to gather DNA samples from three living dinosaurs: the biggest on the sea, land, and air. Mahershala Ali is the ship’s captain who’ll get crew and scientist Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) to the island no one is allowed to visit, they’ll gather some samples and get home. Zip in, zip out.
But wait! Naked alpha zombies!
Just kidding. But seriously, why can’t someone write a proper film for Mahershala Ali and Scarlett Johanssen? Because these are talented individuals (hell, one of them has two Oscars), and they are better than this retread.
To be fair, Edwards crafts some eyepopping set pieces early in the film as two different boats—Ali’s, and that of the cloying B-story family—run afoul of the swimming beasties. These action sequences set you up for thrills, but once both A and B story hit dry land, Gareth is more interested in recycled ideas and images, not just from this franchise but from the Alien series as well. Just get a look at the monster they kept hidden away on that island. I think I know what they were cross breeding that with.
The B-story about a shipwrecked family (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Luna Blaise, David Iacono, and Audrina Miranda) is cliché straight from the family friendly action movie playbook, complete with a comically adorable (and tonally discordant) baby dinosaur stowing away in the littlest daughter’s backpack.
The presence of the family softens the best members of the elite team and amplifies the villainy in the worst. Of course it does because Jurassic World: Rebirth is nothing if not obvious. It obviously knows the story it’s supposed to tell, it just doesn’t tell it especially well.
