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Hey Insect, ‘System Shock 3’ is Official
This truly is an age of miracles. Of the myriad horror games I’d like to see get remade, remastered or sequel’d, I would not have expected to see the System Shock series pick up such considerable momentum so quickly. It’s almost as if there’s someone, or something pulling the strings on this. I’m not sure what the driving force behind this is, but this mysterious puppeteer has shown a level of efficiency that almost seems inhuman.
Oh, I get it. It’s SHODAN.
Without that artificial sociopath, System Shock 3 would’ve taken an additional 3-5 Call of Duty sequels to happen — or 5-7 Assassin’s Creed’s, for those of you who are on the Metric system.
Night Dive only recently acquired the rights to the series and they’re not wasting any time in reminding us exactly why we should care about its return. They’re going about it in a really clever way, starting with their treatment of the first game. It started small, with a remaster that doubled as a love letter to the game’s core audience, earning them the trust of longtime fans who had watched System Shock go neglected for far too long.
Their plan has gotten more ambitious since then, with the recent unveiling of a legit remake that should go a long way in selling a wider audience on it. If that game can appeal to the generations of horror enthusiasts who don’t yet know what it’s like to be torn asunder by SHODAN’s verbal abuse.
When Night Dive’s head of business development told us a month ago that a brand new sequel would only be possible if a third party developer got on board, he must’ve said that within earshot of Andrew Divoff, who probably used what’s left of his wish-granting powers to make it happen.
I want to believe that it was Andrew Divoff, even though it’s more likely that a certain narcissistic jumble of broken code is merely looking to make a comeback. In the first two games, SHODAN had what you might call a divine ambition. She was the almost-video game equivalent of SkyNet, if SkyNet had a wicked tongue and wasn’t quite as adept at wiping out the human race.
SHODAN’s legacy mostly consists of slinging stinging insults in a tone that shifted between how one might scold a child to how one might respond to a bag of garbage that had somehow come alive to describe, in gruesome detail, what it would like to do with all our moms.
System Shock faces a very special kind of obstacle that’s exclusively reserved for cult classics the world almost forgot about when we thought Y2K was killing our computers, or whatever. SHODAN broke me down when I was but a wee lad. I didn’t know you could tear someone apart with words until I had felt their devastating power firsthand. So of course I paused the game after every insult so I could cry into a snack cake for a few minutes.
I was always a sensitive boy, just ask my mom.
I haven’t sobbed into a treat in like, five months. My game is on point. SHODAN best not have gotten rusty, or this will be easy. I’m confident in my position as an adult man. I probably won’t even need one cry-break the next time she and I partake in verbal fisticuffs.
According to the official countdown clock, there’s more to come on Monday. Stay tuned!
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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