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LOTS AND LOTS OF LEFT 4 DEAD INFO AND VIDEOS!
Left 4 Dead, as confirmed in an interview in one of these videos is being shipped November 4th of this year. They make it clear this is a game you want and need to play with your friends. Which is fantastic, my friend Reset and I were in a Game Stop the other day discussing the fact that we think every game ever should be co-op, because most of the time we would rather be playing with friends. Well in Left 4 Dead, you must rely a lot on you friends, because there are certain zombie attacks that will take you down, and you can’t get up until a friend comes and helps you. Zombies are constantly pouring in from every possible opening, you can never leave your back unguarded. If a friend is down, it’s up to you to get to them and heal them.
The game is very fast paced. It’s going to keep your heart beating out of your chest until you put the controller down. This is exactly the kind of game i’ve been looking for, and it being a zombie slaughtering game makes it that much better. It’s like the zombie version of Halo and I’m totally pumped about it.
When you reload, your character says “reloading”, to keep your friends up on if there is going to be a pause in your shooting. Also, you can see all of your friends health on the bottom of your screen so you know if anyone is in danger of dying. If you get vomited on by a zombie, you will get viciously swarmed by them. If you walk by certain items, your character will automatically yell, “grenades over here” to inform the others. And if your character is low on health, they will say, “please cover me” or something of the sort.
If you are playing online with strangers, and one person is screwing off and being a jerk, you can all vote to kick that person out of the party, which is amazing. The game is mostly built for working together, you can’t have a bad member of the team in a game like this.
Watch all the videos if you have the time, they are all completely worth watching, I could have sat there and watched a million more if they had them.
Let’s start with the good news. Lockbox looks far better than its misleading marketing materials suggest, a supernatural horror movie so darkly lit and color graded that you’ll have to squint your way through jump scares. It’s also anchored by reliable genre performers. That’s also about where the good news ends with this rote adaptation of Knifepoint Horror Podcast story “Winthrop.”
The empathetic Carla Gugino gives her all as Ellen, a saint of a woman with boundless patience who takes on life’s hard luck with a kind smile. After giving up her career as a fashion designer to become caretaker for a dying mother, she’s then forced to reinvent herself once more when her caretaker role ends. That catches us up to the events of Lockbox, where Ellen is asked to take in a cousin she hasn’t seen in quite some time who’s dealing with severe PTSD.
Just as Ellen finally establishes a real connection with Winthrop (Lou Taylor Pucci), it’s interrupted by the arrival of peculiar neighbor Vahna (Katharine Isabelle), who spells clear trouble. When Vahna shows up dead, it sets in motion a supernatural battle of possession.
Image Credit: Aura entertainment
Director Daniel Stamm (The Last Exorcism, Prey for the Devil) and screenwriter Justin Yoffe approach Lockbox in the broadest of brushstrokes, dooming it from the start with clunky storytelling and woefully underdeveloped themes of heady topics like PTSD. Winthrop is a character that comes loaded with emotional baggage and trauma that’s piled on throughout his tragic life, but much like its title, his interiority and history are treated like a tightly guarded secret meant to prolong the supernatural mystery.
The problem here, though, is that Lockbox is too sparse to sustain mystery at all, and it instead robs Winthrop of characterization. It winds up trapping the talented Pucci without anywhere to go, toggling between wounded animal and mentally disoriented.
From there, Lockbox bounds through plot developments without any sense of stakes or purpose, peppered by a smattering of haphazard paint-by-numbers jump scares. The only unwavering constant is Ellen’s resolute faith, and Stamm seems to leave it entirely to Gugino to guide confused audiences through this inconsequential story right up until its supernatural climax.
Image Credit: Aura entertainment
To give more credit, Lockbox at least injects an unconventional exorcism here; just don’t expect much in the way of explanation. When the film finally reveals the meaning behind its title, it dangles a fascinating carrot it has zero interest in delivering. More than a severe lack of fleshing out its characters beyond plot drivers or devices, this faith-based flick also seems terrified to offer any worldbuilding whatsoever.
Yoffe’s script stretches the short story beyond its means instead of fleshing it out, and Stamm fills out the gaps with cheap CGI scares and overwrought performances; Isabelle’s Vahna is beyond cartoonish in her villainy. It’s also pretty nonsensical, treating only Ellen’s faith with the utmost sincerity and largely squandering its typically reliable talent. So much so that the final imagery, pure sunkissed saccharine sentimentality, leaves you with the feeling that this horror movie might be better suited as an entry in Chicken Soup for the Soul.
Lockbox releases in select theaters on July 3, 2026.
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