Writer/director Francis Galluppi was chosen to helm the next Evil Dead film. Don’t know him? Wondering what the visceral spew gods Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell see in him? The Last Stop in Yuma County may be your best chance to find out.
The filmmaker’s first feature boasts a collection of genuine talent, each playing a character who shows up one fateful morning at an out of the way diner known for rhubarb pie so good you’ll die.
They’re not there for the pie, though. Gas truck’s late and this is the last station for a hundred miles. They’re waiting: a knife salesman on the way to his daughter’s birthday party (Jim Cummings), an older couple with no place pressing to be (Gene Jones, Robin Bartlett), two bank robbers (Richard Brake, Nicolas Logan), plus Charlotte (Jocelin Donahue), keeping their coffee cups full.
It’s a potent setup, which is likely why so many films have settled into similar booths. While Galluppi works the tension afforded by his premise, he has surprises aplenty in store as well. Most of them spring from the characters that are established quickly and well by his cast.
Brake—reliable as ever in the coolly authoritative villain role—wastes no energy or dialog. He’s a menacing presence in every scene inside the diner. Logan, as his loose cannon younger brother, creates tension and relieves it comically in equal measure.
Characters come and go as we move toward the inevitable standoff, but each actor is able to carve out something memorable. But the one you never forget, no matter how little he does, is Cummings.
No one delivers earnest human weakness with as much awkward tenderness as Cummings, and even when he’s hiding under his table, you know something more is coming.
The Last Stop in Yuma County is a single-location film done extremely well, mining visual details in place of exposition, relying on character to enrich its slight premise, and delivering giddy tension. It’s full of fun, blood and surprises.
The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something has Passed
by Hope Madden
no one told you when to run
you missed the starting gun
Pink Floyd sang of a particular worrisome anxiety. Joanna Arnow perfectly articulates the emotion, or lack of, right from the title of her feature, The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something has Passed.
Arnow writes, directs and stars as Ann with unerringly deadpan delivery. Ann suffers from Millennial malaise. Her job evokes no passion. Her family is clingy and yet distant. Even her interest in BDSM, in Arnow’s hilariously banal depictions, is lifeless.
Growing listless with her longtime, much older “dominant,” Allen (Scott Cohen), Ann engages new partners, then moves to more traditional dating, finally developing a charming relationship with Chris (Babak Tafti, all warmth and tenderness).
At this point, Arnow’s detached irony threatens to make way for genuine human emotion. Chris and Ann’s awkwardness is sweet. You almost root for the film to be turning into a romcom. Arnow toys with that, as well as the coming-of-age arc, resisting cliché and doling out generational insights in hilarious monotone.
While there is something vaguely Lena Dunham about Arnow’s film, her voice is so utterly her own it’s tough to really compare The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something has Passed to anything else.
That voice echoes in the film’s visual aesthetic as well: everyone and everything at arm’s length, somehow simultaneously disengaged but compelling.
Not everything gels, and even the bulk of the film that works brilliantly will not work on everyone. Arnow’s film is an acquired taste— defiantly so. But like most good comedies, it’s saying something incredibly honest and more than a little bit sad.
There is something clever underlying directors Alex Henes and Matthew Merenda’s first feature, Mind Body Spirit.
Anya (Sarah J. Bartholomew) is sharing videos of her journey to wellness. She’s just moved cross country into the home her departed grandmother Verasha left her. She never knew her grandmother, but she sees this as an opportunity for a new life.
Her only friend on this side of the country—wellness influencer Kenzi (Madi Bready)—stops by occasionally to check in and collab on videos. But she can’t really get behind Anya’s new direction, taken from a hand-written book left by the deceased and written mostly in Russian.
Mind Body Spirit has a bit more compassion for influencers than most horror films do. Though the tale mines the cultural appropriation and blissful ignorance that is easy to find among influencers—particularly those peddling wellness—the depiction is not entirely one sided.
Bartholomew’s performance is endlessly vulnerable and empathetic, but even rushed and cynical Kenzi gets a nice arc that deepens the impact of the film’s horror. Because naturally, naïve Anya misinterprets the underlying message in the tome her departed grandmother left her.
The directors also write, along with Topher Hendricks, and their script sometimes dances with language, toying with the way mystical turns of phrase can easily be used, depending on inflection, to terrify.
Shot in one location with a total cast of 4 (one of whom appears exclusively via FaceTime), Mind Body Spirit rarely gives evidence of its budget. The found footage approach is sometimes fresh—the ads between video segments are inspired—but like most films of the genre, there is no integrity to the actual footage: who shot it, who edited it, why and how it got posted, etc.
More problematic is the occasional blood gag. Outright horror is included sparingly, but when it is, the unreality of the gag is pretty evident. The filmmakers don’t really tread any new ground, either. They just pull in social media as a slightly askew way to tell the same story you’ve seen a number of times.
Nonetheless, Bartholomew shoulders what is at least 75% one-person-show and does it with enough tenderness that Mind Body Spirit never loses your attention.
Back in 2019, Olivia Wilde debuted Booksmart, a “smart, funny, raunchy yet quite loving tale of two besties.” It was maybe the best high school buddy comedy since Superbad, and held onto that coveted top spot until last year’s Bottoms.
Prom Dates, Kim O. Nguyen’s first feature after years of directing comedy for TV, treads similar hallowed halls.
Jess (Antonia Gentry) and Hannah (Julia Lester) have been BFFs their whole lives. Back in middle school they swore a blood oath that their senior prom would be the best night of their lives.
What? A blood oath. With actual blood. About prom. Who’s buying this?
Fast forward a few years. It’s the night before senior prom, and Hannah, who can bear no longer to pretend she’s heterosexual, breaks up with her clingy boyfriend (Kenny Ridwan) just as Jess finds her douchebro boyfriend (Jordan Buhat) cheating.
What?! They’re both dateless for prom! Which is [checks notes] how most kids go to prom anymore.
Nguyen’s episodic background shows, and writer D.J. Mausner’s years writing sketch comedy amplifies the film’s lack of cohesion. They stitch together one borrowed situation after another as the girls wildly seek a new date for the dance. Each attempt is meant to bring with it edgy hilarity—Shots! A stripper! Vomit! A cannibal (I’m sorry?)! Oh, the hijinks.
Ensemble performers are saddled with one-note caricatures (Ridwan is especially abused in his thankless role). But the reason Prom Dates doesn’t land the same way the others did is that the bond between Jess and Hannah never feels authentic or lived-in.
Lester elevates what she can with an instinct for earnest comedy, but every mistake Hannah makes has such a tidy resolution, you can’t help but feel the filmmakers’ sketch/TV influences.
As much as I wanted to like this movie, it’s simply a watered down Booksmart with no real stakes.
Muse and madness, art and commerce duke it out in a slew of films that mine the depths of the artistic nature. We welcome author LCW Allingham, whose dark novella Muse looks at the darker side of art, to join us as we use a little fuzzy math to share our favorite horror movies about artists.
6. Devil’s Candy (2015)
Ethan Embry plays Jesse Hellman, struggling metalhead painter who, with his wife and pre-teen daughter, just bought a bargain of a house out in the Texas sticks. Why so cheap? Amityville shit.
Jesse’s a metalhead and a painter and writer/director Sean Byrne (The Loved Ones) mines the dark artist nature for all its worth in a film that benefits from a rockin soundtrack, and a slew of good performances (shout at the devil to Pruitt Taylor Vince).
A convoluted storyline that mixes supernatural with serial killer is a bit of a drawback. But clocking in at under 90 minutes, Devil’s Candy is a tight little rocker. The lyrics are familiar, but the riffs still kick ass.
5. House of Wax (1953)
An update of the 1933 Mystery of the Wax Museum and precursor to Wax Works (and, of course, the 2005 loose remake), this Vincent Price classic tells a campy fun tale that also resembles a lot of Price’s other films.
An elegant artist turned disfigured madman, Price’s Henry Jarrod creates masterful wax figures of historical horrors. But there’s a secret behind the realistic look!
Yes, you totally know what that secret is, but that diminishes the fun of this film not one tiny bit. Price is fun, Carolyn Jones is a hoot, Charles Bronson’s a wild piece of casting. And the whole bit of insanity boils down to the fact that an artist who wants to earn a living has to sacrifice their integrity.
4. A Bucket of Blood (1959)
Roger Corman’s riff on House of Wax sets this dark comedy in LA’s beanik community of the late Fifties. Dick Miller’s perfect as a dimwitted janitor who accidentally becomes the next big thing by turning a cat, then a police officer, then other people he kills into sculptures.
The more he makes, the more famous he becomes, and the more he rationalizes the murders. Corman’s tone is cynical but fun, working from Charles B. Griffith, who’d also write Corman’s Little Shop of Horrors. It’s a weird little gem of a film.
3. Stopmotion (2024)
There will be moments when you’re watching Robert Morgan’s macabre vision Stopmotion that you’ll think you see the twists as they’re coming. That’s a trick. Morgan, writing with Robin King, assumes you’ll catch the handful of common horror twists, but he knows that you won’t predict the real story unfolding.
Aisling Franciosi (The Nightingale) is Ella. She’d like to make her own stop-motion animated film, but instead she’s helping her mom finish hers. Ella’s domineering mother Suzanne (Stella Gonet, very stern) is a legend in the field, and she makes Ella feel as if she has no stories of her own to tell.
Stopmotion delivers a trippy, uncomfortable, and deeply felt tale of a struggling artist. This is a descent into madness horror of sorts, but it’s also the story of an artist coming to a realization about what scares her most.
2. Mandy (2018)
Writer/director Panos Cosmatos’s hallucinogenic fever dream of social, political and pop-culture subtexts layered with good old, blood-soaked revenge, Mandy throws enough visionary strangeness on the screen to dwarf even Nicolas Cage in full freakout mode.
Like Cosmatos’s 2010 debut Beyond the Black Rainbow, Mandy is both formally daring and wildly borrowed. While Black Rainbow, also set in 1983, shines with the antiseptic aesthetic of Cronenberg or Kubrick, Mandy feels more like something snatched from a Dio album cover.
When his artist girlfriend Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) is kidnapped and killed by a cult, Red (Cage) enacts a bloody quest for revenge.
Or is it all the story Mandy’s painting?
Either way, it is as badass as it can be.
1. Candyman (2021)
For Nia DaCosta’s sequel to the 1992 classic, we go back to Chicago’s now-gentrified Cabrini Green housing project with up-and-coming artist Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), whose works have taken a very dark turn since he learned of the Candyman legend from laundromat manager William Burke (Colman Domingo).
DaCosta’s savvy storytelling is angry without being self-righteous. Great horror often holds a mirror to society, and DaCosta works mirrors into nearly every single scene in the film. Her grasp of the visual here is stunning—macabre, horrifying, and elegant. She takes cues from the art world her tale populates, unveiling truly artful bloodletting and framing sequences with grotesque but undeniable beauty. It’s hard to believe this is only her second feature.
By the time a brilliant coda of sadly familiar shadow puppet stories runs alongside the closing credits, there’s more than enough reason for horror fans to rejoice and…#telleveryone.
When Brandon Cronenberg decided to be a filmmaker—one keenly interested in corporeal horror—it felt both natural and brave. Natural because his father David is perhaps the all-time master of body horror. Brave for the same reason.
It turns out, Brandon Cronenberg is a natural. (If you haven’t, you should definitely see his films.) But the family affair doesn’t end with him. Daughter Caitlin Cronenberg’s feature debut Humane sets her slightly apart from the fellas, though.
Written by Michael Sparaga, Humane takes place in a near future where climate catastrophe requires that each country on earth purge itself of 20% of its population. A euthanasia program allows citizens to enlist, helping the nation reach its quota, helping the planet survive, and providing government funds to the family bereaved. But with numbers lower than expected, the nation is considering conscription.
Cronenberg’s tale focuses on one family in particular. Patriarch Charles York (Peter Gallagher), retired from a storied career as a TV journalist, invites his four adult children (Jay Baruchel, Emily Hampshire, Sebastian Chacon, Alanna Bale) home for an important dinner. Dad, and the kids’ stepmother Dawn (Uni Park), have decided to enlist.
With this dinner bombshell Cronenberg sets in motion a realistically cynical look at a government’s opportunistic manipulation of a thinning of the herd. She then zeroes in on the festering effect of privilege on the York children, simultaneously throwing shade at the “salt of the earth” types who are as violently judgmental as their position allows.
Gallagher’s great as the martyr desperate to leave a legacy, and Hampshire’s ferociously self-serving villain is a joy. Enrico Colantoni delivers the most fascinating, frustrating character, easily stealing every scene.
Humane makes two horror films in a row, following last week’s Abigail, where you don’t really root for anyone. Everyone’s terrible and it’s slightly disappointing that anyone survives at all. Worse, the big revelation that pushes characters toward the climax is unearned.
More problematic is that there are two fairly substantial omissions—not plot holes, just conveniently placed gaps in clarification that feel like intentional cheats. Beyond that, the writing often feels slightly behind the times. Jared York’s (Baruchel) claim that he “doesn’t see color” feels more suited to a tale set a decade ago rather than in a near-future dystopia.
These writing concerns don’t sink the effort entirely. An intriguing premise buoyed with darkly comedic performances, plus a brisk 90 minute runtime keep Humane entertaining, but it’s hard not to feel a bit disappointed.
Filmmaker Bertrand Bonello reconsiders the Henry James novella The Beast in the Jungle, blending the fear of intimacy with a larger scale societal pressure to minimize our unruly natures.
Bonello, writing with Guillaume Bréaud and Benjamin Charbit, crosses three timelines to expand and deepen his vision: Paris 1910 during the Great Flood; LA 2014, when a 4.4 earthquake struck as the incel phenomenon was born; and back to Paris in 2044, long after AI has become master to humanity’s subservient species.
These are the timelines in which Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) struggles with “the beast” — an overwhelming sense of impending disaster. Memories of Gabrielle’s previous lives are ignited by the 2044 cleansing process meant to minimize human emotion, making people more reliable workers.
In each storyline, Gabrielle dances around a possible relationship with Louis (George MacKay). Pressure to conform and the idea that emotional safety is key to happiness are obstacles to their passion. But it is Gabrielle’s obsession with impending doom that forever keeps the two from connecting.
Bonello revives James’s age-old terror of intimacy with the modern terror of AI, and does it with such nuanced humanity that even the occasional spot of stilted dialog can be forgiven.
Seydoux, forever a marvel of raw human emotion, perfectly animates the fight against sanding down the rough edges of humanity. But Bonello throws a wild curve ball with his 2014 plot, tangling psychotic entitlement within the story’s misunderstood concept of intimacy.
The shift in focus could pull you from the hypnotic romance of the other timelines were it not for the exceptional work of his cast. MacKay treads a narrow path of gentlemanly interest, effortlessly illustrating the heartbreaking proximity between tenderness, apathy and contempt.
The Beast is a lush affair, gorgeous to look at and nimble in the way themes echo across eras. It’s also an elegant reminder that an unruly heart is nothing to silence.
Remember Quarantine (or Rec, for that matter)? Remember that moment when you realize you’re locked inside an apartment building, trapped with the ravenous undead?
OK, so that but spiders.
Nice, right?!
Sébastien Vanicek’s Infested (co-written with Florent Bernard) doesn’t steal from other movies as much as it mines the primal fears that have plagued the most effective horror movies from the beginning.
Kaleb (Théo Christine) is a well-meaning dumbass. He lives in a dump of a high rise, but he loves the place, loves the neighbors, and cherishes the memory of his mother. That’s why, unlike his sister Manon (Lisa Nyarko), Kaleb doesn’t want to leave. In fact, he’s made a cozy home in his room for any number of exotic little beasties—the latest of which he just picked up from the super-secret back room of a dodgy shop.
“Careful, it’s probably poisonous,” the shopkeeper calls as Kaleb carries his rubber-banded plastic container and the very poisonous, extremely nasty spider inside.
Jumping ahead, Kaleb does not heed the warning.
Apartment horror can be so creepy when it’s done well: dark hallways, grimy elevators, creepy parking garages, too many floors until safety, and loads of places for spiders to nest. Vanicek makes excellent use of these spaces, and he shows solid instincts for creature FX—when to go practical, when to show little, when to show lots (and lots and lots). But his film succeeds on the lived-in world of these neighbors and friends.
Christine (Gran Turismo) delivers messy, loving authenticity as the guy who cares deeply and screws up everything. Finnegan Oldfield (Final Cut) is even better, and he brings with him a realism and natural charisma that cements the rag tag band of survivors as human beings to root for.
That realism doesn’t extend fully to the arachnid horror. Their reproductive mechanisms, their feeding habits, growth spurts—well, they’re not supposed to be from deep space or a nuclear accident, so the extremes seen in the building definitely strain credibility.
But damn! That doesn’t make it any less creepy! You may find yourself shaking out your sleeves and pulling the drawstring tight around your hoodie. I did. But at least the cockroaches are under control.
