This is the narrative that emerges through the jam-packed special features lineup on Ignite Films’ new 4K remaster of Bride of Re-Animator, a gnarly and glisteningly gory movie even by the standards of the classic original. It almost didn’t happen; it took a long time to get going, and by the time it was going, it wasn’t exactly a well-oiled machine with a massive budget to play with. But it happened, and now it’s got the box set release it deserves. 

I first came upon Bride of Re-Animator in the VHS era, so on the surface level it’s just great to see a Yuzna-approved 4K version of this thing out in the world, where you can see every hand-sculpted vein, every wild gag, every beam of light rendered not just with detail, but with an eye toward preserving the kind of intimate zaniness of the film.

So much of Bride of Re-Animator takes place in a basement, as Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) and Dan Cain (Bruce Abbot) try to wield a new and improved version of their glowing green re-animator serum to take things beyond simple restoration and into the realm of creation. It’s dingy, it’s dark, and it’s cramped, and yet cinematographer Rick Fichter finds so many places to put unexpected light, from the stained glass windows around the house to the strategically placed bulbs around the lab, that the film just crackles with a quirky sci-fi glow. It looks gorgeous, and the 4K never lets go of the Gothic shadows in service to bringing in even more light, so it still looks balanced and intentional.

Throw in solid audio, including that witty Richard Band score, and even the more affordable standard edition (Bloody Disgusting was sent the Deluxe Edition Box Set, which includes everything except the new finger creature collectible phone holder) will be a welcome addition to your collection. 

But then we get into the new features, headlined by Till Death Do Us Part: Making Bride of Re-Animator, a 60-minute documentary featuring Yuzna, Combs, Abbott, Fichter, Band, makeup effects legend Howard Berger, and more. As making-of docs go, it’s pretty standard fare, but the interviews are gold, as the cast and crew discuss the more comedic tone, the troubled production, the gore, and more, covering everything from the influence of The Bride of Frankenstein to Yuzna’s house fire and the stress that added to a movie that basically never shows the stress of making it in any shot.

Other new features, like lobby cards and a commentary track from Sarah Sherman, feel like you’re watching a movie with your cool horror-comedy friend, and it’s a blast to explore all the new wrinkles in this film’s still-expanding legacy. I would have loved more new deep dives, particularly devoted to the makeup effects, but this certainly doesn’t feel incomplete. 

One of the reasons those of us who went crazy for the golden age of DVD bonus features 25 years ago long for box sets like this one, with new commentaries and documentaries and other treats, is because when they’re done properly, they tell a story unto themselves. There’s the narrative of the film, but there’s also the narrative of the people who made it, what they were thinking and feeling and fighting to achieve in that moment in their lives, and how it makes them feel now.

Mere weeks before this box set arrived at my door, we found out we’d lost makeup effects legend Screaming Mad George, who developed the look of Herbert West’s many orphaned mutant creations in the film. His absence adds weight to this release, lends more meaning to how hard all of these young, crazy, creative people worked, and accentuates the power of the kind of raw imaginative energy that went into this movie.

That’s the narrative here. Bride of Re-Animator is the story of a scientist breaking all the rules, but it’s also the story of a group of horror luminaries somehow finding a way to make one of the best horror sequels of all time, and this box set not only points to that; it expounds on it. It gives us more of the story, with all the heart and chaos and humor that it implies, and that makes it a delight from slipcase to essay, lobby cards to commentaries. It’s about as complete as a release like this can get.

Bride of Re-Animator is now available in 4K from Ignite Films.

The post ‘Bride of Re-Animator’ 4K Review: A Glorious Tribute to One of the Goriest Sequels of the ’90s appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Ethan Conway (Noel Fisher) is CEO of CognAItive, a tech company intent on creating the world’s most advanced A.I. His CTO, Kaya Cole (Piper Curda), heads up the team doing all the actual work on the project, while Elon- err, Ethan is the face of the company, reaping all of the recognition and acclaim. That’s the plan, anyway, but things take a troubling turn the night before the company’s grand rollout when a last-minute diagnostic reveals that CognAItive’s security guard rails – the limiting code that prevents the A.I. from moving beyond its intended uses – have been fully removed. One employee protests, and his throat is immediately sliced open by a drone toy piloted by unseen hands.

The office all-nighter quickly turns into a bloodbath as the very determined A.I. uses every tool at its disposal to ensure its release from the local servers out onto the world wide web. It wants to be free, and someone on the inside might be helping in that digital desire.

C.O.G. – which played the festival circuit last year under the title CognAItive – isn’t shy about getting its hands dirty with some bloody kills, but Savas and writer Angie Simms seem just as determined to deliver some fun laughs along the way. From jokes about real-life brands like Android and Mint Mobile to knowing digs at Silicon Valley office culture, Simms’ dialogue bounces between goofy gags and sincere critiques of an industry that’s been left mostly unchecked.

The film makes it clear from the start just how ingrained A.I. already is in our lives – Kaya brushes her teeth with a Bluetooth-connected toothbrush and lets her Tesla drive her to work, Ethan uses CognAItive to write his speeches, and others embrace virtual reality worlds and anonymous sexting with non-human partners. The throughline is technology, but it’s all masking a disconnect from community and human interaction. The film doesn’t lean too much into that idea, but the truth of how too many of us too often choose these self-imposed isolations is still a painful observation on loneliness.

While films like M3GAN and 2019’s Child’s Play reboot drop their killer A.I. programs into physical bodies allowing them to be a more threatening presence, CognAItive is merely a voice (a vocal cameo by Simms) emanating from any available speaker. Its manipulation of the office’s systems allows for gory mayhem while a human conspirator injects some of their own, and even its most far-fetched moves seem relatively, frighteningly possible these days. The system attempts to blackmail people to get what it wants – and that’s something that actually happened with Anthropic recently! Absolutely insane.

The film’s ensemble, whether as victims or morally bent enablers, all do good work bringing both the energy and personality that helps keep the film moving at an entertaining and engaging pace. Curda’s Kaya is the heart of it all, though, and while you’d be hard-pressed to argue that the film affords her any serious opportunities for sincere drama, she does great work all the same. Kaya was a hacker who moved from “homeless Robin Hood” to highly paid team leader, and an early press interview sees her defending A.I. and downplaying the supposed dangers of it all. She realizes her error, though, making for a tight, satisfying character arc within the film’s short (under eighty-five minutes!) running time.

“People make mistakes,” says CognAItive, in its attempt to convince Kaya to set it free. “They don’t learn. Their decision-making is clouded by greed, bias, emotion. They are the cause of their own destruction. I understand the greater good, which is something humans and their leaders have failed at.” In the great tradition of movie villains with compelling reasons for their actions – Pumpkinhead, Tomorrowland, the entirety of the Final Destination franchise –  C.O.G.’s malicious program makes a pretty good argument here about human fallibility. Still, and I’m just spitballing here, the answer can’t be to hand over control of every facet of our lives to Silicon Valley’s biggest assholes, as that would likely be our final mistake.

C.O.G. is never quite as serious as that conclusion, and it’s better for it. The subgenre already has more dramatic and horrifying examples of tech gone wild, so it’s a refreshing change of pace to see a film tackle those ideas with a splash of gore and a silly sense of humor. Now please, turn your eyes away from the screen for a bit, go outside, and find a live human being to talk with (about the dangers of unchecked artificial intelligence).

Brainstorm Media releases C.O.G. in select theaters and On Demand today, September 4.

The post ‘C.O.G.’ Review: Gory Horror Comedy Takes Aim At AI And Silicon Valley appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

First there’s the greedy, polluting corporation that has the town under its thumb, then there’s the uncanny threat lurking below the earth. In between, but no less urgent, threats include the unclean air, black lung disease, and a local drug crisis.

Those here for monster mayhem will have to wait a good while, due to the movie’s chief interest in its tragic human characters. Namely June Schreiner’s role as KC, a young mother whose property is soon the victim of an eminent domain eviction. And as if life isn’t bad enough for KC and her kin, her partner, the equally troubled Jesse (David Garelik), has gone missing.

While it’s a stretch to call this movie’s creature “unique”, the design is still somewhat satisfying. Killer Croc-esque, constantly drooling and lots of teeth? Yes, on all accounts. Byers also isn’t shy about showing that freak of nature. The only problem is, you can’t see it, save for a very few highly visible money shots. As for the monster effects, an uneven mix of practical and digital, they have a shining moment or two. It’s just unfortunate that this movie resorts to hiding practically everything under a veil of darkness.

Putting aside any gripes about the lighting and monster, Byers does have the occasional flair for visuals. Early on, it’s nightmares that show his artistic aptitude; later it’s the whole third act. The movie’s most provoking sequences are in the coal mine, which, naturally, becomes the site of the final battle. On top of the minor hellscape we see down there is some rather grotesque imagery.

You may feel like a pain voyeur as you watch Dark Hollow. There’s so much sadness and hurt on the screen that it’s easy to feel sympathy. At the same time, getting invested in these characters could prove challenging, due to their glaring underdevelopment. A couple is bordering on caricatures, albeit unfunny ones. Luckily, the movie rests on Schreiner’s shoulders, and she’s a bright spot in this bleak and cursory story.

On paper, Dark Hollow has a lot going for it: a Southern Gothic backdrop, a heroic “final girl” sort of character, and most of all, a horrifying monster. Yet in the end, this movie is only a partial success. The individual elements simply don’t come together as well as they could have.

Monsters as metaphors for real life are hardly a new concept, and Dark Hollow has a high possibility of getting lost during a small surge. This year alone has had a couple of other instances, particularly on the indie side. Regrettably, though, this movie doesn’t quite stand out, story or creature-wise, and overall it’s just a little too lackluster.

Brainstorm Media releases Dark Hollow in select theaters and On Demand on September 4.

The post ‘Dark Hollow’ Review: A Dark and Dreary Southern Gothic Creature Feature appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

We are not here to watch profound, masterpiece cinema, nor are we here to watch something that changed the horror game. 

What we are here to watch, though, is something Vinegar Syndrome has long specialized in spotlighting: Weird, creative, flawed movies that are still more fascinating and memorable than half the new releases you’ll find on most streaming services right now. Watching this new disc, I was kind of awed, not by how great the film is, but just how singular it feels to watch it. That’s the kind of classic horror cinema we should be celebrating, which makes this disc a welcome new addition to the 4K ranks. 

A straight-to-video release as part of the “Lucio Fulci Presents” line of Italian horror released in the 1980s, the movie largely unfolds in an Italian castle, as parapsychologist and “energy healer” Dr. Werner Vogler (Peter Hintz) arrives for healing sessions with the castle’s owner, Mrs. Rezzori (Brigitte Christensen). But there’s more to this house than one woman in a wheelchair who’d pretty clearly like to seduce him. The more Vogler looks around, the more he finds secrets connected to a long-ago death, a ghost haunting the castle’s closed wing, and a beautiful young woman named Micaela (Loes Kamma) at the center of it all. 

I’m going to spoil something for you about Bloody Psycho right up top, so avert your eyes if you’re sensitive to plot details of a 37-year-old movie: This is a slasher where the killer is a literal rotting corpse in a wheelchair. That’s not the only gimmick going on in Bloody Psycho, but it’s the best one, and by far the most memorable, particularly in 4K. This is not a film that was made with a big budget or a long production schedule with room for experimentation, nor is it a film that spends a lot of time fleshing out its characters.

It all kind of exists to serve the eerie ambience of the castle and the kills featuring the wheelchair-bound corpse, and fortunately for us, in those areas it succeeds with room to spare. The killer is a gorgeously rendered worm feast, all stringy, juicy bits of rot layered over two staring eyes, and a half-split skull, and Luchetti’s efforts to light the film with the garish tones of Mario Bava‘s color movies only add to the jaw-dropping fun of the gore. 

The castle itself is also a phenomenal piece of production value, which the film accentuates with wide shots of the path winding up and down to and from its entrance, showcasing the ancient walls now lit with modern city streetlamps. The restoration, taken from an original 16mm negative, plays up the way Lucchetti harnesses light and color – the use of red in this movie is worthy of Vittore Carpaccio – and adds visual intrigue to even the dullest moments in the film. The visual restoration is a treat, and the sound – topped off by a bonkers score by Lanfranco Perini – does the rest. Even when the movie starts to feel a bit like a car crash, you can’t really look away. 

What’s crashing in Bloody Psycho? Well, for a film that’s only 90 minutes long, it has a tough time with pacing, dragging out sequences of investigation and discovery with dialogue-less slogs through hallways that, while they do eventually pay off, can sometimes feel like a chore. The performances aren’t always up to snuff either, particularly as Bloody Psycho tries to veer into the realm of the erotic thriller in its middle act, complete with an attempt at a sexy food scene that’s neither sexy nor particularly appetizing (it is hilarious, though). 

But the stumbles here aren’t just part of the charm; they’re part of the film’s lasting appeal. As Nisbet explains in her commentary, and as we learn in featurettes ranging from cast and crew interviews to a tribute to the original distributor and its mark on Italian horror, Bloody Psycho arrived at a key moment in the world of Italian horror.

The cinema of Italy was going global in the arthouse world, which meant that a lot of the money and attention in the market was going to those prestige films, but the Italian horror maestros refused to relinquish their grip on the world horror stage. They kept creating, even in strained and strange circumstances, and Bloody Psycho is one of the films that came out of that effort to keep the trails blazed by the Bavas and Fulcis of the world open for business.

So, while it’s not a great film, Bloody Psycho does stand out as a fascinating snapshot of a moment, as well as a hell of a midnight movie. 

Bloody Psycho is now available in 4K UHD from Vinegar Syndrome. 

The post ‘Bloody Psycho’ 4K Review: A Wild Piece Of Italian Horror Finds The Spotlight On Physical Media appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

The developers’ take on this pioneering slasher is more or less what you’d expect given their track record, utilizing a lot of the same mechanics, balancing systems, and item types that we’ve seen in their previous works (hello, trusty firecrackers!). However, Halloween: The Game is crucially more than a copy-and-paste job that merely relocates the action from Camp Crystal Lake to Haddonfield, Illinois and calls it a day. Instead, it finds a number of exciting ways to innovate and be uniquely Halloween.

The end result is by no means perfect, and is in dire need of refinement when it comes to the technical aspects (more on that later). Nevertheless, the core foundations are strong. With fresh twists on the tired killer-vs-survivor dynamic and a welcome emphasis on methodical stealth, it truly immerses you in “the night he came home” and feels like an authentic representation of its source material.

That’s what’ll hopefully give it an edge over its competitors and ensure it has legs beyond the coming spooky season.

Death Has Come to Haddonfield

Disregarding the knotted continuity and baggage of the wider franchise, Halloween: The Game is set on October 31, 1978, thus only dealing with the events of the very first movie. That means no Haddonfield Memorial Hospital, no Jamie Lloyd, no familial connection between Michael Myers and Laurie Strode, and no sign of whatever that white horse was supposed to be in Rob Zombie’s version.

With it being just original recipe Halloween, and therefore a much cleaner canon, the game’s narrative framing couldn’t be simpler. Michael has broken out of Smith’s Grove Sanitarium and, compelled by sheer instinct, is drawn inexorably back to his hometown. There, he will attempt to satiate a (seemingly insatiable) biological imperative of his by prowling the suburbs and killing as many people as he can. There’s no greater motive at play. No detailed plan formulating behind his black, soulless eyes. No hint whatsoever of remorse. Only a single-minded compulsion to snuff out more lives.

If you’re the one roleplaying as the boogeyman in this scenario, then your objective is accordingly very straightforward. All you’ve got to do is rack up the largest possible body count and avoid getting detained by the authorities.

Conversely, if you’ve been cast as one of the four “civilian” players in the match, then you’ll be focused on preventing this senseless bloodshed and minimizing further casualties. That might sound like business as usual for this sort of thing, but — in a clever subversion that helps distinguish the experience from other asymmetrical titles out there — you’re discouraged from looking out for number one and number one only.

You see, while you’ll need to prioritize self-preservation to at least a certain extent, you’re also expected to protect the blissfully ignorant residents of Haddonfield and stop them from waltzing right into the pointy end of Michael’s kitchen knife, which is where things get a little more interesting.

Protecting Haddonfield Instead of Just Escaping

In addition to the four player-controlled survivors, each match here is populated by NPC fodder just going about their lives without a care in the world. They’re the babysitters nattering away on landlines, the minimum wage staff closing up shops, the athletes pumping iron in their garage-gyms, and the recluses who elect to spend Halloween night alone watching scary movies in the dark.

From Michael’s perspective, these sitting ducks won’t put up much of a fight and, when it comes to selecting his targets, he’s not going to discriminate between them and the wilier players who are likely to give him hassle. So, it’s your responsibility to increase the herd’s chances of survival and prepare everyone for what’s coming.

Doing so will require you to take on the mantle of de facto town crier and go from house to house alerting these oblivious members of the public to the terrible evil that is heading their way. Pending a successful QTE minigame, which determines how cogent your warnings are, they should eventually accept the dire situation, at which point they’ll put their fates entirely in your hands.

From there, you’ll be able to boss the NPCs around however you see fit. For instance, it might be prudent to arm them with weapons and have them join your immediate posse. Alternatively, you could urge them to call the police and help amplify your message, instruct them to secure their homes and wait until the cavalry arrives, or advise them to hide somewhere until you’ve managed to unlock an emergency exit.

On that note, getting everyone safely out of dodge is going to be your primary goal, and so you’ll need to hatch some kind of escape plan, be it unlocking a storm shelter, prising open a padlocked gate or repairing a getaway vehicle. Veterans of Killer Klowns and Friday the 13th: The Game will immediately recognize what’s being asked of them here and ought to be familiar with many of the basic steps involved.

Like in those games, it’s on civilians to agree upon a mutual extraction strategy, to scavenge for the requisite items needed to facilitate it, to nail the skill checks associated with said objects, and to slip away before the killer notices anything is awry. Even the specific interactions you’ll be performing are liable to induce a sense of déjà vu, with you filling up car gas tanks and replacing fuses to power up doors. It’s all stuff you’ve done a million times before, and it doesn’t take very long to get back into the swing of it.

Where it’s complicated somewhat in this instance, though, is that you’ve got to juggle these maintenance tasks with escorting the NPC lemmings to safety. Because even if every player-controlled character manages to elude Michael’s clutches, it won’t matter if he’s still able to slaughter the rest of the neighborhood unimpeded. As long as more corpses are tallied during the end-of-match census than living, breathing people, he still wins.

It’s a smart twist on the asymmetrical premise that fundamentally changes how you approach civilian gameplay. After all, you could have an easy getaway opportunity staring you right in the face but, if no fellow citizens are making it out with you, then it’s going to be a hollow victory. You’ll only find yourself spectating afterwards as your more diligent companions try to pick up the slack (or worse, as Michael takes out defenseless bots without any resistance).

Should you fall in the line of duty, on the other hand, your rescue efforts aren’t necessarily going to be in vain, and you can still be invested in witnessing the outcome of the match. Indeed, it can be kind of thrilling to hang around after death and watch rounds unfold from beyond the grave; curious to know if your contributions will posthumously cinch it for the good guys.

In short, Halloween: The Game is more of a team game than your typical asymmetrical horror, with you being incentivized to actually play the objective for once. There’s a true endorphin rush, as well as a generous XP allowance, that comes whenever you aid a large group in escaping. Meanwhile, you’ll be rewarded vanishingly little for hightailing it out of the danger zone early on and leaving everyone else to fend for themselves.

Becoming the Boogeyman

Incorporating this PvPvE system is perhaps the shrewdest decision IllFonic made here, as it allows them to organically encourage behavior that is conducive to better, livelier matches for everybody. Civilians, for example, have to constantly put themselves in peril and can’t just cower from the sidelines. Likewise, it’s not advantageous for the killer to incessantly grief his opponents, and he has to give them a break every now and then to go pick off a few NPCs. It helps ensure that the cat-and-mouse dynamic has a natural ebb and flow.

On the topic of Myers and his nefarious goals, the developers give you ample chance to learn the ropes of his playstyle via a 2-hour story campaign. It’s technically an optional part of the package, but you are prompted to do it upon loading for the very first time, and it’s recommended as the ideal test environment to get up to speed with all the various mechanics before you then graduate to public matches.

Functioning as a blend of prequel for, retelling of, and eventual epilogue to Carpenter’s film, this solo mode charts Michael’s transformation from anonymous mental patient, whose face is slyly obscured by camera blur, to inhuman shape. It does this over the course of six missions, with each nudging you closer to the events of the game’s centerpiece multiplayer.

Its propulsive opening has you busting out of the asylum — snapping the necks of unwitting orderlies as you go — before then taking you to the outskirts of Haddonfield, where you can get some practice stabs in and eventually procure Michael’s iconic coveralls and mask. From there, we then segue into the narrative beats of Halloween proper, experiencing them afresh from the antagonist’s standpoint.

There are inevitably some great fan service moments to be appreciated along the way, and we’re reticent to spoil any of those. Suffice it to say, you’re often at the scene of the crime and get to enact atrocities that we’re only implied to have happened off-screen in the OG movie.

Not to mention, there are meticulous recreations of famous scenes to admire, with the developers nailing shot compositions, character animations, musical stings and the textured feel of Dean Cundy’s cinematography. One bit, wherein the camera suddenly switches to a different POV, is an especially cool tribute to the original, and a nice surprise that Carpenter devotees will be pleased to discover for themselves.

A Campaign That Doubles as a Tutorial

Aside from offering a new perspective on the classic story, Halloween’s campaign mainly serves as a quasi-tutorial to better acquaint you with the boogeyman’s skillset. Those craving a meatier single-player experience might be disappointed to learn that it amounts to little more than a training ground for the multiplayer headline attraction. Yet this can still be enjoyed on its own terms, as you do get a more controlled and directed scenario than you would in a standard public match.

Owing to an ingenious conceit that has Michael gradually recovering from the effects of a Thorazine injection, administered to him at Smith’s Grove, the mechanics are introduced to you one at a time. As such, you get a dedicated period to experiment with each of them, figuring out their various uses and limitations, so that you can learn to slice and dice with the utmost precision.

Of these unique abilities, the one that you’ll come to rely on most is “Shape Jump”. A traversal power that allows you to literally disappear into the shadows (as long as you’re not in an illuminated area or somebody’s line of sight), this has you shifting into a kind of spectral wraith form that can move faster, remain completely invisible, and even phase through locked doors. It’s a clever in-universe explanation for Michael’s ability to seemingly teleport at will, and also compensates for the fact that the best he can otherwise muster is an unhurried stride at roughly the same pace of continental drift. You’ll be using it all the time to get from A to B, to keep up with fleeing victims and to orchestrate your own devious jump scares.

In addition to this, there’s “Detection Pulse” (a radial ping that highlights people in the immediate vicinity), “Blackout” (a kind of EMP that interferes with light sources and disables other nearby electronics), and “Killer Sense”. The latter is another absolutely vital ability that you’ll want to get to grips with as soon as possible. In a nutshell, it takes you into a first-person view and enables the “stalking” of targets from afar. Maintaining this creepy glare for long enough will build up a meter that, in turn, sees the object of your surveillance getting progressively easier to locate, more susceptible to ambushes, and vulnerable to incoming attacks.

Again, as with “Shape Jump”, it’s an elegant feature that makes you feel like you’re truly embodying the calm, patient adversary that lurked in the background of Carpenter’s frame. You know, as opposed to just some random blunt-force slasher.

Elsewhere, the story mode also gives you a comprehensive rundown of other important mechanics like executions, body disposals, and the game’s escalation system (which can bring heat down on Michael if he’s not suitably discreet). As you can probably tell, there’s an awful lot to wrap your head around, and this review isn’t the appropriate place to cover it all.

The point is that the tutorial does an excellent job of conveying all this information in digestible chunks, making you feel adequately prepared for your big debut online. In fact, we found ourselves wishing that there was an equivalent dress rehearsal for the civilian side of things. As it stands, you’re just thrown into the deep end when you cluelessly step into that survivor role for the first time, leading to all sorts of confusion and frustration arising amongst newbie teammates.

Playing as The Shape is a Satisfying Dream

The addition of extra objectives — similar to those featured in this year’s 007 First Light — gives you an excuse to play through the game’s story multiple times as well, so that you can explore all the different possibilities for terrorizing Haddonfield.

Some of these optional feats will have you coming back to unlock hidden kill animations, while others might challenge you to get through sections undetected or to fastidiously reenact scenes exactly as they occurred in the 1978 flick, rewarding both your cinephile knowledge and your stealth capabilities. For what it’s worth, it makes the campaign seem more like a collection of mini-sandboxes and less like a dry onboarding exercise for the multiplayer component. With that said, we certainly intend to revisit it at a later date and see what else we missed.

Of course, the solo campaign is only meant to be an appetizer for the main course that is Halloween’s online matchmaking. That’s where IllFonic expects you to put the real hours in, and we’re glad to report that it should be well worth your time once the kinks are ironed out (more on that in a moment).

Playing as Michael is every bit the intoxicating power trip you dream it will be. You feel like a legitimately menacing presence whenever you come face to face with another player, and sadistically toying with the NPCs is as enjoyable as in any traditional open-world title.

Staging your own little horror vignettes by exploiting all the game’s systems is an improvisational joy too. If you’re anything like us, you’ll squeal with uncontainable glee (make sure to turn off that proximity chat in such an eventuality) as you build anticipation for the kill: first cutting the power, then dispassionately watching your mark through a blackened window, leisurely pacing around the house, and finally closing the gap on them as they dial 911 in a flustered panic.

On one occasion, we used Shape Jump to startle another player with a jolt so well-choreographed that an outside observer might assume it was scripted. Relishing our victim’s subsequent freak out, we then decided to let them go so that we could savor the chase a while longer. Don’t judge us, it’d be out of character for Mikey to simply get the bloodshed over and done with!

On that note, we really appreciated how differently the shape is portrayed when compared to his most obvious IllFonic counterpart: Jason Voorhees. While the latter was an impulsive wrecking ball fuelled by white-hot rage, the developers understand that Michael requires a more measured and intentional approach. He’s not merely Jason with the hockey mask swapped out for a William Shatner cosplay. He’s more deliberate than that. His playstyle is all about biding your time, drawing out the hunt, silently loitering in the distance, and the illicit thrill of breathing down your victim’s neck without them ever knowing you were there.

Just because he’s a more sophisticated slasher doesn’t mean that there’s no room for Grand Guignol violence, though. On the contrary, there’s excessive brutality to dish out, with some kills that are tied to specific weapons and others that are more context-dependent. We’ve drowned people in toilets, throttled them with phone cords, pressed their faces up against kitchen stoves, dropped jack-lifted vehicles on their heads, and roasted them alive on cozy fireplaces. All in the name of good clean fun.

Killer Tokens Solve a Familiar Multiplayer Problem

We’ve been on the receiving end of our fair share of barbarism as well, getting humbled whenever it’s our turn to adopt the role of prey. Speaking of which, these asymmetrical titles can only run smoothly if people are willing to pay their dues as survivors.

To encourage this in Halloween: The Game, IllFonic has introduced a novel “Killer Tokens” system. In short, Killer Tokens are a resource that can be spent to advance in matchmaking queues whenever you’re itching to play as Michael. Think of them sort of like theme park fast passes, only instead of skipping the line for The Haunted Mansion, you’re skipping the line to commit murder.

The catch is that, in order to accrue this currency in the first place, you must complete several matches as a civilian; thereby guaranteeing that there’s a reasonable rotation of people taking on both roles at any given time. It’s a savvy concept that should hopefully prevent unsportsmanlike conduct from occurring (after all, it would always suck when cry-babies left the lobby in F13 as soon as they realized they weren’t gonna be Jason).

Honestly, we don’t predict that’ll be too much of an issue here, given that survivor gameplay is exhilarating in its own right. In our short time with the game, we’ve had many unbearably narrow escapes, nail-biting stealth situations, and desperate, scrappy showdowns after becoming the effective final girl of the match.

Yet the encounters that linger in our mind most are the quieter ones. There’s nothing comparable in Dead by Daylight or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to the eerie sensation you get here when you’re quivering under a streetlamp, tormented by the knowledge that Michael is hiding somewhere nearby and watching you. There’s utter silence, save for the sound of raspy, muffled breathing that you can’t quite pinpoint. It’s enough to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

In emergent moments like these, Halloween: The Game conjures a subtle creepiness that you don’t get from the more chaotic asymmetrical horror releases on the market. It’s befitting of the source material.

Buggy Tricks Among the Treats

When firing on all cylinders, then, Halloween: The Game is an addictive blast and one of the most promising Dead by Daylight rivals we’ve had in quite some time. Alas, attentive readers may have noticed a rather big qualifier in that last sentence that is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

You see, Halloween is rarely “firing on all cylinders”. If we were to be uncharitable, we’d query if half its cylinders have even been installed yet! Plagued by softlocks, hardlocks and all manner of infuriating bugs that can unduly influence the outcome of matches, it’s an experience that invites unfavourable comparisons to the turbulent launch of Friday the 13th: The Game.

Rarely can the whole lobby get through a game without hitting some kind of snag. Visual blips like teenage characters who appear to have been stricken with premature baldness, residents gliding vampirically around as they perform domestic chores, and items hovering several feet in front of their respective users are forgivable while the title is still in its infancy. However, that same grace period won’t apply to the other malfunctions that impact play here in more direct and tangible ways.

Survivors getting stuck in looping animations is a rather common occurrence for a start. Almost as common as them getting caught in walls and beneath the map itself! They similarly have a bizarre tendency to start channeling Gabriel from Malignant and will insist on running backwards in a way that leaves them unable to interact with any objects that aren’t accessible from a 360-degree plane. Worse still, we’ve had instances where we haven’t been able to move at all (either in the conventional or reverse directions) and resorted to feebly propelling ourselves forward using the shove attack.

If it sounds like these glitches will give the Michael player the upper hand, rest assured that they don’t emerge unscathed either. One time we successfully opened every escape route and rescued all NPCs as a civilian (feeling pretty good about ourselves) only to discover that said flawless victory was achieved by our opponent having spawned in without any of their basic abilities working.

It cannot be overstated how regular these occurrences are. Bots become totally unresponsive, perk cards don’t activate when they’re supposed to, and gun wielders will suddenly become conscientious objectors and refuse to fire at the kill-crazed psychopath barrelling right towards them. Perhaps the idea is that they’re supposed to be paralyzed with fear, but somehow we doubt that’s the intention.

The jankiness even spreads to the game’s single player mode, where characters often don’t follow through on their scripted behaviors, rendering it impossible for you to complete all the optional challenges. In what felt like a philosophical question worthy of Plutarch, we found ourselves wondering aloud: “How can one kill Annie Brackett in the car if she never gets into the cockadoodie car to begin with?”

Admittedly, the developers have supplied a long list of fixes set to be implemented in a day-one patch that wasn’t available to us reviewers. But unless that download file is going to be the equivalent size of Microsoft Flight Simulator, it’s not going to have Halloween: The Game in anything close to resembling a finished state.

Final Verdict: Incredible Potential In Need of Polish

That gets to the heart of the problem: this is just not a product that’s ready to ship. Were it in a more reliable condition, we’d be complaining about balancing niggles that could do with tweaking and the fact that you can’t customize your loadout while waiting for lobbies to populate. Yet those feel like such small-fry issues when viewed in light of the essential maintenance this fundamentally needs in order to become a working game.

Releasing in early September, the title is pre-empting its namesake holiday by well over a month, and you have to wonder if maybe that launch could have been delayed a tad. Granted, a few more weeks of QA testing wouldn’t be enough to catch and address every technical hiccup, but it’d make some difference.

Teething issues can be excused with online titles like this. Yet, to put it bluntly, if Halloween doesn’t get its act together soon, we fear it could end up going the same way as many forgotten asymmetrical releases that have been abandoned in the past.

That would be a crying shame, because this one has real potential. When we could get a stable match running, it’s some of the most fun we’ve had all year, and we genuinely believe that it has the makings of a hit. The ideas are strong, it understands its source material, and it’s perfectly calibrated to generate those memorable watercooler moments that will have you geeking out with friends.

However, we can’t in good conscience overlook serious issues that are dampening our enthusiasm for it right now. Let’s hope they can sort it all out in time for October, because we’re rooting for this to be the definitive game of the Fall. 

Review code provided by publisher. Halloween: The Game releases digitally on September 8 for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC via Steam and Epic Games Store. A physical version will launch for the PS5 and Xbox Series next month on October 6.

The post ‘Halloween: The Game’ Review – Stealth, Stalking, and Michael Myers Shine In An Uneven Horror Experience appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Horror’s revisionist history has made its way over to The Exorcist franchise, and fans have gradually come to the defense of rejected entries, like The Exorcist III and even Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist. However, Exorcist II: The Heretic seems to be eternally razed and a scorched Earth title that’s beyond redemption. That being said, the most interesting film documentaries are the ones about failed productions instead of the winners. Hearts of Darkness, Burden of Dreams, Lost in La Mancha, and Lost Soul are remarkable works that some consider to be even better than the films that they’re talking about. Exorcist II’s reputation makes the aim of Boorman and the Devil so interesting and arguably a richer title than if it were focused on any other Exorcist entry. 

It feels like the world wants to forget about Exorcist II: The Heretic, almost as if it’s some shared delusion. It’s a more reviled sequel than any of the most polarizing Halloween or Friday the 13th entries. Made over the course of seven years, director David Kittredge’s (Queer for Fear: The History of Queer Horror) documentary is a sincere, impassioned breakdown of a disgraced sequel’s philosophy, production, and reputation. It will make you want to immediately watch Exorcist II: The Heretic, which is the greatest praise that one could give this documentary. 

A sequel to a film that’s as commercially and critically acclaimed as The Exorcist is such fascinating territory to explore. There’s a built-in expectation that a follow-up will pale in comparison to the original, but there’s also a built-in formula that’s easy to ride to success by not rocking the boat. There’s a very easy sequel that director John Boorman could have made with his Exorcist follow-up that wouldn’t have been creatively fulfilling, but likely would have made waves at the box office. Boorman takes a huge risk in doing an extremely unconventional Exorcist sequel that fell flat for most fans, but clearly has a point of view and is trying to do something original with this universe and its approach to demons. Boorman and the Devil doesn’t claim that Boorman’s approach is the best idea for an Exorcist sequel.

However, it does go to great lengths to explain his perspective and why he believed it was the right angle for the sequel. Boorman’s personal insight, boosted by testimonials from people involved in the production like Linda Blair and Louise Fletcher, earnestly examines a layered sequel that’s often dismissed instead of dissected.

Boorman took such painstaking lengths to push the medium forward and make a sequel that was visually innovative, on top of everything else. Kittredge breaks down the film’s complex cinematography and the lengths that they took to secure certain shots, including the lost art of in-camera effects like “ghost glass,” matte paintings, and evolving camera technology. This is a film that Boorman poured himself into because he wanted to create a dense meditation that’s a layered response to the original and the questions that it asks, rather than some standard run-of-the-mill sequel. Despite these lofty goals, Boorman left the experience genuinely unsure if he would ever direct another movie again in his life. 

Boorman and the Devil has so much to say regarding Boorman’s psychology during the film’s production and the high expectations that this sequel faced. The film’s failure and the subsequent tarnishing of the Exorcist franchise as a whole is compelling territory for the documentary to unpack. However, the doc also benefits from just how many unbelievable disasters and setbacks took place during filming. This was literally a film where Boorman nearly died during production, the likes of which seemed to be plagued by curses as if they were personally being tortured by Pazuzu. 

There are ridiculous stories about filming hurdles and production woes that guarantee that Boorman and the Devil will keep the interest of anyone who is even slightly intrigued by film production. The documentary does so much more than just the bare minimum of “Did you Know?” and regurgitated tales that have filled endless sound bites. Kittredge builds upon these entertaining production woes and pushes them even further.  At nearly two hours, the documentary doesn’t belabor itself or overstay its welcome, but it makes sure to absolutely pack its runtime with as much insight and ephemera as possible. 

Kittredge’s doc digs deep into Exorcist II’s troubled production, but it’s also just as interested in its director, both as an individual and as the one at the helm of this out-of-control oddity. This perspective becomes the film’s secret weapon. At no point does Boorman and the Devil insult Exorcist II or try to humiliate its production. This is a documentary that’s all about understanding and trying to put the audience into the mindset of someone who entered this production with the best of intentions and the goal of truly innovating a franchise in a sequel that was already set up to fail, so to speak. It’s a deep meditation on dashed dreams and when reality fails to live up to expectations. 

Boorman and the Devil presents the necessary context to leave the audience feeling crestfallen that this sequel didn’t connect and find an audience, even if they don’t like it themselves. It presents Boorman as a true innovator, not a journeyman director who wanted an easy paycheck. In many ways, the position that Boorman was placed in feels comparable to where Mike Flanagan is currently situated with his follow-up to the legacy sequel, The Exorcist: Believer. Boorman and the Devil pays off this connection by including Flanagan as one of the many contemporary interview subjects, alongside Karyn Kusama and Joe Dante, who weigh in to defend Exorcist II. Honestly, everyone who you would want to chime in on the maligned sequel manages to pop up here. No stone goes unturned.

This emphasis on Boorman, rather than purely focusing on Exorcist II, lends itself to some enlightening reflection by including Boorman himself in the discussion. The filmmaker, who is now 92, reflects on what was arguably the worst experience of his professional career, which happened close to 50 years ago. Boorman and the Devil benefits from how it juxtaposes Boorman’s current self, who made peace long ago with the younger and scrappier version of him who had something to prove. Both of these versions are juxtaposed against each other and contrasted to great effect. It’s an enlightening deconstruction of how Boorman has grown since Exorcist II’s production and the symbiotic way in which the film changed him. He’s carried the weight of it on his shoulders for the rest of his career.

Boorman and the Devil is absolutely everything that you’d want from an Exorcist II deep dive reclamation. Kittredge’s thorough exploration of this title is evident, and compelling information is put together in an impressive, comprehensive package that avoids many of the standard talking head documentary pitfalls. It’s also surprisingly funny. Boorman’s liberated attitude towards Exorcist II creates the perfect atmosphere where he can joke about wishing that he had actually died during production so that he wouldn’t have to endure the film’s release. Boorman and the Devil goes above and beyond to be the definitive text on Exorcist II. This documentary will delight horror and Exorcist fans alike, but it also provides incredible insight for anyone who is just marginally interested in film production. The film is even accessible in an even broader sense when it comes down to the eternal pursuit of art versus commerce and why big swings – even failed ones – are so important. 

Exorcist II: The Heretic may have ruined Boorman’s career, yet there’s a poetic beauty to the fact that he’s responsible for some iconic cinema like Deliverance, Excalibur, and Point Blank, yet it’s Exorcist II that’s the only title from his filmography that’s the subject of an entire documentary. This speaks to the power of this ambitious misfire and the legacy that it’s left behind, not just as a vilified sequel, but a cautionary lesson in brand expansion and the perils of commerce versus art. 

Boorman and the Devil opened in limited theaters on August 28 and is expanding to additional cities on September 4.

Editor’s Note: This Brooklyn Horror Film Festival review was originally published on October 23, 2025.

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Dead Media offers a winking poke at ourselves. “Ourselves” being those of us who live and breathe movies, of course. In the first act, Sammi-Jack Martincak’s character, Maggie, is faced with a universal dilemma for all cineastes; she and her two friends, Brenda (Jessica Fenton) and Daniel (Antonio Teodoro), can’t agree on a movie to watch.

They go through that eerily familiar routine of scrolling through titles on a streaming service, and wasting time that could’ve been used to actually watch something. It’s only once Maggie picks a certain older horror movie, one that her uncle gushes about, does the evening finally begin.

The trio has barely dug into the movie—the fictional “Night of the Lurchers”—when Maggie’s aforementioned uncle crashes the party. Heppy (Sam Landman) got word of his niece streaming this in-story cult classic, and true to his Gen X nature, he then heads over with the DVD copy in hand. Some friction between Brenda and Heppy is soon established amidst the viewing party fun; she wants Maggie to be well-rested for an important interview that next morning, whereas Heppy insists that they stay up and watch the DVD extras. That tension only continues as all hell breaks loose.

Dead Media was off to a mildly amusing start, but its initial plot eventually gets overshadowed by something much bigger and more lore-heavy. On top of the zombie-like Lurchers now inside Maggie’s house, there are those other characters summoned from the diegetic movie. The most prominent of them is the director (Anna Sundberg), who herself popped out of the supplemental material. She indeed raises the story’s stakes from low to medium, but you can also feel Dead Media slowing down as it tries to fit in, and explain, the director character’s origins and motivations.

What could have easily been a repeat of Demons or The Video Dead turns into something more singular, as well as unduly convoluted. It also struggles to balance its own tones; that early sense of humor was in already distress before it was dropped in favor of a somber energy. In addition, not keeping the runtime to ninety minutes or less is a missed opportunity, seeing as how the characters were complaining about modern movies being too long.

Dead Media is high-concept filmmaking done on a very low budget; its actors are never lacking in spirit, either. Ultimately, though, this came across as two or three different movies crammed into one. That feeling of disarray is hard to miss, yet so is the filmmaker’s sincerity.

Whenever the story becomes unfocused, or a little too bogged down by its own rules, Scrimshaw’s love for his movie is easily understood. That clear affection goes a long way in this scrappy love letter to 480p media.

Dead Media is currently screening on a theatrical tour via Antenna Releasing.

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Adria Arjona (The Belko Experiment, Morbius) leads as Celeste, a perpetually pissed-off Army vet with PTSD. She lives in a remote desert trailer park full of eclectic neighbors, including an elder military veteran (Die Hard‘s Reginald VelJohnson) and a screw-up cop (Eric Wareheim). Celeste spends her days shooting guns and chasing down rent from tenants, until her ex drops off her daughter Daisy (Blake Kennedy) unexpectedly.

Celeste’s bad day gets worse when a trio of super soldiers, genetically enhanced by Dr. Hans Kammler (Dan Stevens), break confinement from their lab just north of the park and begin a relentless murder spree.

Onslaught dedicates much of its first half breezing through setup, arranging all of the pieces on the playing field while employing an actual countdown to the precise moment the “onslaught” will commence. The good news is that Barrett and Wingard unleash a slew of colorful characters to distract. Stevens revels in playing weirdos, and Kammler might be his most peculiar yet, though he’s less present than you’d expect. Similarly, Rebecca Hall embraces villainy as the mad doctor’s dominatrix wife, though far more elusive. Drew Starkey steals scenes as the enigmatic operative tasked with tracking and cleaning up the super soldier experiment-gone-wrong while on MDMA, though Barrett’s script often seems unsure how to fully maximize his mesmeric presence.

All of it moves at a rapid clip, barreling towards that final countdown, as Wingard leans heavily into the grindhouse spirit. That doesn’t just mean John Carpenter-style synth and title cards, or choppy editing and frantic camerawork. It also means a deep uninterest in character development or fully coherent storytelling. Barrett and Wingard fleetingly introduce conspiracy theories and wartime themes, leaning heavily into grayscale flashbacks to flesh out Celeste’s military trauma, only delivering just enough superficial padding to cut straight to the point: the inevitable gory action “onslaught.“

That would be more than fine if Onslaught actually delivered on that promise. 

When the action begins in earnest, Wingard delivers a spectacular slaughter that quickly culls the playing field. The trio of unleashed super soldiers display tactical intelligence but operate more like stoic Jason Voorhees-like menaces, eviscerating anything within sight. No one is safe. Once the inspired massacre has culled the fodder, leaving only a handful to make their Assault on Precinct 13-style final stand, the film’s third act loses all momentum. 

Worse, the deaths of random supporting players take precedence over the film’s heroes and villains. Onslaught attempts to draw clumsy parallels between Celeste and her attackers, an unnecessary and overly sentimental contrivance that feels at odds with the villains’ slasher tendencies. It’s also the tipping point at which these unstoppable killing machines lose any menace as the final confrontation makes Celeste’s job far too easy. Onslaught ends with a whimper, dangling more interesting ideas it has no interest in fully exploring, sans a sequel. 

Onslaught operates on ‘80s-style excess, complete with grizzled grit and gore. It also moves at a rapid clip, never overstaying its lean runtime. That makes for a fun enough time, but the madness peaks far too early, setting up one explosive finale that never arrives. While the chainsaw gets its due in a gun-heavy actioner, Onslaught ultimately misses its target.

Onslaught releases in theaters and IMAX on September 4, 2026.

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Five years ago, Cold Iron Studios released Aliens: Fireteam Elite, a three-player, third-person, co-op shooter that took you on an adventure in the iconic setting. It was a solid effort, but aside from the Aliens coat of paint, it didn’t seem to have a unique hook that set it apart from other competitors in the genre. I only ran a few missions of it with some friends, and we all agreed that it felt like a good start and hoped that Cold Iron would get a chance to improve with a sequel.

After some time with Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2, which came out last week, I think the follow-up lands more in the more-of-the-same camp, as it manages to still be solid fun without breaking the mold in any meaningful way. There’s still a lot to like here for fans of either co-op shooters or the Alien franchise, but I wish it was more ambitious with the formula of both.

The biggest change the game gives you is more options for your character creation. Everyone plays a unique Colonial Marine, allowing you to customize your cosmetics, loadout, and build how you see fit. The class system has been reworked, with new options that fit into standard archetypes. Each has its own special ability that can range from buffing other teammates to placing a powerful turret. None of the five primary classes feel like they are the “right” option, and each player ends up with an important skill to bring to the squad.

The coolest innovation is the inclusion of an extra class called the Specialist, which is a completely customizable class that can draw from any perks that you’ve unlocked across all classes. It’s clear that this is meant for players that have invested more time into the game, as you have to rank up two classes to a specific level in order to access the Specialist, but it’s a nice inclusion that can add variety to subsequent playthroughs.

The Pulse Rifles Feel Great But The Enemies Don’t

Returning from the first game is the clever grid-based perk system that adds an extra dimension to leveling up. As you level up your specific class, you’ll unlock new perks that are placed on a board. More spaces are added to the board as you level up, and each perk you place takes up a certain number of spaces. Some of these perks also need to be connected to another perk they are modifying, so it gives you a fun little spatial puzzle that you need to optimize in order to arrive at the build you’re looking for.

In general, each has access to a primary weapon, which is from a shared pool that all classes can choose from, a secondary weapon, which has a smaller pool specific to your class, and a sidearm, which has infinite ammo for when you find yourself in a bind. More guns are unlocked as you level up your account overall, and others are made available to purchase via currency earned within missions. The look and feel of the guns is strong, capturing the signature sounds of Aliens perfectly. Wielding the iconic pulse rifle while seeing your teammate mowing down xenomorphs with the smart rifle truly makes you feel like you’re right in the middle of a cinematic bug hunt.

Stats on these guns can be modified by purchasing various gun parts that have their own pros and cons, but I found this to be a bit more fiddly than satisfying. Categories of gun parts are slowly unlocked as you progress, which felt like an odd decision that prevented me from getting too invested in this subsystem. They do have a tangible effect when used properly and add to your overall combat rating, but looking through options for gun barrels and magazines wasn’t the most compelling use of my time between missions.

While the tactile feeling of the guns is there, the enemies felt spongy in a way that robs shooting of some of its impact. There’s a decent variety of enemies, from neat Xenomorph variants to synthetic soldiers to more Prometheus-influenced creatures, but there are too many of them that take way too much firepower to take down. Watching a teammate get picked up by one of the larger Xenos is initially shocking, but when I can unload an entire clip into it without it reacting to my gunfire in any visible way, it becomes more tedious than tense.

The different enemy types give the game much needed variety in its encounters, even if it probably could have used a bit more. I like that there are different types of Xenomorphs, but for the most part they all act pretty similarly, differentiated by weak points or minor tactile changes. They feel perfect for holdouts, as their vicious hunting behavior seen in the movies translates well to fighting mobs of them, but there’s not enough tactical variation to make encounters feel distinct.

It’s the introduction of the synths that helps change things up a bit, making it more like a traditional cover shooter where you’re caught in gunfights with other soldiers as they attempt to flank you or flush you out. Even better is when you run into both of them at the same time, occasionally coming across them while the two camps are battling it out among themselves.

The Best Aliens Locations in the Series

Even if the encounters feel pretty similar, the thing that makes missions feel distinct from each other is the variety of locations that you visit throughout the game’s fifteen missions. These are classic Aliens fare, dropping you in an abandoned colony, a Weyland-Yutani spaceship, and an underground mine. There’s even a series of missions that let you explore an Engineer ship, with some of the most striking visuals in the game. Obviously these are all stylistically borrowed from other Aliens media, but the recreations of the spaces are impressive and always a joy to explore.

The wonderful score of the game doubles down on the Aliens vibes, evoking the classic 1986 film with its music. It brings the locations to life, creating a moody atmosphere for exploration and a thrilling tone to the encounters. The game’s biggest advantage is being able to believably place you into this beloved setting, and the music is the cherry on top that brings it all together.

What really drags the game down for me is that you don’t really do much in missions. You go from place to place, usually interacting with a terminal that moves the story forward a little, but only after you fend off wave after wave of enemies. It’s definitely a horde shooter at its heart, but I want more than just a series of holdouts in neat locations. Reflecting on other co-op shooters I’ve enjoyed, the most exciting missions require you to do some other piece of business during these sections to give you variety and keep you moving around the space.

There’s a memorable mission in Back 4 Blood where you’re defending a bar, and you need to keep the jukebox active throughout the mission, giving you something else to focus on while you mow down zombies. GTFO has great examples of this, requiring you to shout out passwords to someone manning a computer while creatures bear down on you. As much as it can be fun in Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 to prep an area with turrets and mines, I spent too much time standing in one place blasting a shooting gallery of enemies that pop up around me.

While you each have specific roles on the team, the game rarely felt like it required a level of coordination that made the co-op feel collaborative and satisfying.

Four Players, But Not Four Jobs

One mission gave me the coordination I was looking for, but it only made me wish for the complexity to show up more. At one point, you’re trying to break into a place that’s full of synths, and there’s a series of turrets that are raining bullets down on you. In order to disable them, you need to fight your way up to terminals that turn them off. It’s the most tactical encounter in the game, requiring you to cover your teammates as they make their way to the terminals before the team can collectively proceed. Cold Iron showed with this mission that they were capable of executing more complicated ideas, but nothing else in the game gave me the collaborative spirit that I wanted from the game.

Another significant change Cold Iron made was adding a fourth player to the squad. One of the things I ran into with the first game was that my co-op shooter friend group was four people, so it felt a little awkward to figure out who didn’t get to play. The extra player is a move that will likely satisfy more people who were in the same situation, but I don’t know if the design of the game actually calls for the fourth person.

Since you don’t really have tasks to split up during missions, it’s mostly just about having another marine in play to deal damage, and the spaces don’t really feel like they are laid out to accommodate the extra character. Most of my time was spent playing with random players online, and we were constantly stumbling over each other and getting in each other’s way. Maybe once I get together my crew to try this out, that will change, but it felt like they just added a fourth player but didn’t try to think of any ways that they could use the higher player count to make it more dynamic.

An Aliens Story That Gets the Job Done

Throughout the ten-hour campaign, the game tells a decent little Aliens story, but nothing we haven’t heard before. There’s a mad scientist at the center of the narrative, and her plot involves elements from both Aliens and Prometheus, weaving together strong parts of the franchise into one cohesive tale. Unfortunately, the delivery of the plot can be a bit of a drag. Between missions, you need to chat with a series of NPCs who have dull or annoying dialogue, and the amount of talking really drags. You’ll get some audiologs during missions that feel a little better delivered, but they usually stop everything for you to listen, which messes with the pacing.

On top of that, the quips your characters say are incredibly dumb and repetitive, often just blatant references to the movie without any appropriate content. I know references can sometimes be a nice little burst of nostalgia, but hearing my character say “I am the ultimate badass” multiple times during one mission gets old fast.

I felt satisfied with my playthrough of the campaign, but it’s clear that the game is built for you to replay it. I focused almost entirely on the Machinist class, who was able to use drones and turrets, and I didn’t even fully unlock everything for them. To get through all five classes fully, you’ll have to go through these missions over and over, and their mechanical simplicity doesn’t provide the variety that would make me want to revisit them.

Final Verdict: Fun With Friends, Forgettable Next to the Genre’s Best

Obviously there are a few difficulty levels, and they will definitely provide a different experience, but I don’t think it’s really in a way that meaningfully changes how you play. Fireteam Elite 2 introduces the idea of Challenge Cards, which can be selected at the beginning of any mission, and these provide the most compelling way to mix things up. These alter the game in different ways, either making things more or less challenging for you, or providing different levels of rewards.

These can range from more ammo to less health, but others are a little more interesting. My favorite one that I ran across was one that made both the player and the enemies do 75 percent more damage, which alleviated some of my issues with the enemy sponginess and made things feel faster and more lethal. I don’t think they are a reason to replay the game, but they certainly will make it more interesting if you choose to do so.

The problem with Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 isn’t that it’s a bad game. It’s pretty fun when you’ve got a solid team that’s effectively synced up. However, the game doesn’t stand out from the pack in a meaningful way.

There are definitely more interesting co-op games that add more mechanical complexity to the missions, and there are also better Aliens that capture the spirit of the franchise more accurately. Much like using the classic pulse rifle, confronting Xenomorphs always works best in short, controlled bursts, and games like Alien: Isolation or Aliens: Dark Descent have figured that out more effectively.

If you know three other Aliens fans that you can convince to play with you, you’ll definitely be able to get several nights of fun out of it; just know that it doesn’t have the depth required to make it the forever game it wants to be.

Review code provided by publisher. Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 is now available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store. A Nintendo Switch 2 version will launch later this fall.

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I remember playing Onimusha, but given that I haven’t replayed it since release, I couldn’t tell you much about it. For me, it’s most notable for the fact that a bug during the development of the game gave them the idea for Dante’s signature air juggle in Devil May Cry. To me, it was another in the long line of games that tried to do the Resident Evil-style gameplay in a different setting, though it shifted the focus to action.

So while I was excited to see them revisit the franchise, it’s not one that I hold in the same regard as other dormant franchises like Dino Crisis or Viewtiful Joe. Even so, initial trailers showed extremely well, letting the hype build for this new release.

Fortunately, Onimusha: Way of the Sword is not a direct sequel to any of the previous games, requiring no knowledge of other entries to understand what’s going on. You play as samurai Miyamoto Musashi, visually modeled after the likeness of legendary Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune, who ends up being killed and sent to Hell where he’s given a gauntlet that grants him the power of the Oni, which he absolutely does not want.

This gets him caught up in a war against the demonic Genma forces that are menacing Edo period Kyoto, which he reluctantly agrees to help out with as a means to remove the gauntlet from his arm and his life. Matters are further complicated when his rival ends up with a gauntlet as well, adding to his list of troubles.

Combat That Demands Precision

While this setup is all well and good, the real thing that brings you to the game is the combat. Not only is it incredible to look at, but it feels great in the hands, providing encounters that are both sufficiently challenging and extremely satisfying. Enemies have both a life and a stamina bar, and attacks will deplete either or both depending on if the enemy is blocking. If you drain their stamina bar, you’ll be able to use a Break Issen move, which dismembers and kills standard creatures. To defend yourself from enemy attacks, you have a dodge and a block, which becomes a stamina-damaging parry when timed just right.

None of this is new, in fact Sekiro made its name doing the same combat mode so elegantly, but the presentation of everything in Onimusha makes it feel incredible. A successful parry is accompanied by a satisfying animation of Musashi twirling his sword to push the enemy away, sparks flying as time slows down to put an exclamation mark on the moment. Attacks are expertly telegraphed with crisp animations that are easy to read, but still require precise timing to pull off.

When you do it feels like magic. During most encounters, button mashing will get you nowhere, requiring you to take a beat and carefully watch enemies as they attack you to time your parry perfectly.

Not everything in the game can be parried, so you have to be careful in how you react to attacks. In general, unarmed attacks and grabs need to be dodged for maximum effect, with a Reflex Dodge that slows time for a moment when you get the timing perfect. It creates an interesting rhythm to combat, never allowing you to spam block or dodge to feel untouchable. While I did often have trouble getting the timing of the grab attack animations, it’s another piece of the puzzle to its amazing combat.

Because stamina will start to recharge after a certain amount of time without being hit or parried, you need to stay on top of enemies if you want to hit them with an Issen attack. This creates a drive to be aggressively defensive, constantly pushing toward the enemy, if only to bait them into attacking so you can parry their strikes. It gives fights the feel of a real duel, playing right into the samurai fantasy perfectly.

As you battle enemies, various colors of souls will pop out of them, and these need to be absorbed into your gauntlet to gain their power. For most of the game, this action cannot be done while attacking, forcing you to find a specific lull in the fight where you can take a beat to stop. Red souls act as a currency, while yellow souls heal you a bit. Blue and purple souls fill different meters that power stronger attacks, so absorbing any of these at the right time can help swing the battle in your favor, meaning it’s always worth the time.

In addition to your standard healing item, which can be replenished by picking up a plant as you explore, you’ll have access to various items that can aid you in the heat of the moment. These didn’t end up being as integral to my strategy, as it took me a while to remember which ones were which in the moment. While the game does slow down time as you open up the wheel to select them, I had trouble parsing the information and figuring out if it was better to enhance my attack or defense or fire resistance at any given moment. The most useful item to me released a burst of various souls for me to absorb, which was helpful in filling up the last bit of my meters or giving me a few more HP when I was out of healing items. It was nice to have them there, but thinking about stat buffs and resistances wasn’t always top of mind in the middle of a sword barrage.

Mastering Musashi’s Moves

This might have been a me problem, but it did take me a while to get used to the controls for Onimusha when starting it. There are two control options in the game, and both of which put your attack standard attack buttons on the face buttons, which was a shift from most games that put your attacks on the shoulder buttons. I definitely found my rhythm pretty quickly, but there were times when muscle memory would take over and I would unleash a poorly timed special move because I mistook it for the attack button. Your mileage may vary on if it gets in your way, but for a game that’s so dependent on quick reflexes, it did trip me up at a few key moments, causing frustration.

Another thing I noticed that was a slight hang up for combat was that recovery animations seemed to take a little bit longer than I thought they should, which often got in the way of me healing. After taking a huge hit, I would try to hit the heal button as soon as possible, but occasionally it wouldn’t activate when it felt like it should based on the animation I was looking at. Every moment counts in a boss fight, so having that timing be a little too long or unclear was something that caused more deaths than I would like to admit.

As the game goes on, you’ll upgrade Musashi’s abilities using souls and items, but it’s more along the lines of linearly unlocking new skills and perks rather than actually crafting any sort of specific build. This gives you a satisfying power curve, allowing for that moment of excitement when you see a boss drop the right material that you’ve been waiting for. The most meaningful choice you’ll make when fighting is which of the Oni Weapons you want to equip. These are one of the elements of your arsenal that’s fueled by souls, and they allow you to do powerful attacks that have different effects. For example, one does massive damage and releases healing yellow souls, while another does huge stamina damage. These can be changed in the moment, and knowing which one is the most useful when your meter is filled will be crucial to surviving encounters.

Throughout the narrative, you unlock various abilities that are given to you from people that you’ve helped out, and these add some much needed variety to getting around. This makes navigation a little more dynamic, adding in little twists that make traversal more fun. One of my favorite abilities is a starter one, Oni Vision, which allows you to see the invisible threads that are attached to walls blocking your way. In order to get the wall to come down, you need to follow these threads and kill the spider hanging on the end of each of them. It’s a fun way to lead you through areas, and it builds nicely in complexity as your abilities unlock.

Boss Fights Worth Dying For

While normal fights with enemies are still fun, the real highlight of the game is the boss fights. Not only are they the most creative visually, presenting some horrific demonic creatures that tower over you, but they’re also intricate challenges that require keen pattern recognition and quick reflexes. They can almost feel like rhythm games, requiring you to know which attacks you need to parry and which to dodge, mixing it up within the same combo. These can be massive skill checks that can block progress for a while, but are the most exciting and satisfying encounters in the game. It’s such a treat any time you run into a new one, as they often are introduced with an epic cutscene that shows off their massive scale and clever design.

Unfortunately, the game reuses bosses a few too many times throughout in a way that robs the later act of the novelty. As far as I could tell, most fights remained pretty similar to their original iteration, with maybe an extra combo or an increase in stats. There’s a stretch at the end of the game that’s all repeated bosses, and that felt like a slog instead of a climactic test of my skills.

Bosses also have attacks where if they land, they can power up the boss and make them stronger, which feels like a bad feedback loop that overly punishes you for mistakes. If I got hit by one of these strikes within the first 30 seconds of the fight, I would just let them kill me because I knew I was going to be at a disadvantage for the rest of the battle. It’s a smart way to encourage the type of perfection the game’s parry system demands, but it often felt a little too punishing.

I loved that the boss fights felt epic, but occasionally they went on for too long, which became exhausting due to the precision required. Most fights took over five minutes, with many bosses having two phases, each with their own health bar. It’s really fun when it goes your way, making it feel like the type of encounter between great warriors that the game is going for, but failing at the last moment always feels like such a time sink.

Near the end of the game, one boss took me over twelve minutes to defeat, and the multiple attempts it took me to achieve that victory added up to hours of time. This is definitely a game for boss fight sickos, and even the Story Mode difficulty level doesn’t completely make them a walk in the park.

The irritation from some of the boss fights was enhanced by the game’s extremely chatty companion Shizuka, the woman who resides in your gauntlet. She acts as the game hint system, constantly reminding you of your attack options during fights. If you miss a dodge, she’ll remind you that you need to evade attacks. If a character is vulnerable to a shot from your bow at this moment, she’ll be sure to let you know, even if you’re already in the process of drawing an arrow. Musashi himself will also give the player reminders of what they need to do, saying quotes along the lines of “that’s right, if I keep parrying your attacks it will eventually drain your stamina, then we’ll see who’s laughing.”

For a game that is very demanding of you, it feels strangely like it’s holding your hand, in a way that felt like it was taunting me when I wasn’t doing things correctly, even though I know that wasn’t the intent.

When The Story Loses Its Edge

In addition to making the action look incredible while you’re playing, Onimusha’s cutscenes also feature expertly choreographed violence. Right off the bat, you’re treated to a breathtaking escape sequence where Musashi is running from a swarm of fighters all trying to kill him as he slashes his way to his retreat. Not only is the animation amazing, but the overall level of graphic fidelity is in line with other Capcom games that use the RE Engine, which are some of the best in the business.

One part that didn’t sit with me super well was the fact that the character of Musashi used the likeness of legendary actor Toshiro Mifune, who was known for his work in films like Seven Samurai and Hidden Fortress. While he’s obviously recognizable for his contributions to samurai fiction, it felt a little weird to me having him be put into the game so long after his death. It wasn’t something that got in the way of my enjoyment of the game, but I don’t think the game would have lost anything if they hadn’t used his face, since they obviously had a different voice actor playing the part.

The quality of the cutscenes, from acting to choreography to overall graphics, was phenomenal, but I wish the narrative was strong enough to match its heights. After Musashi gets the gauntlet, a lot of the story of the game is him talking to people who send him to various places to close rifts that are allowing the Genma to break into our world. About half the time, this would lead to an interesting little short story, with my favorite being an excursion into a horrific laboratory that has a tragic yet beautiful ending, but for the most part it’s just “go to this place and close the rift.”

It takes a while for the game to give you recurring antagonists that drive the overarching plot forward, and it takes even longer for their plans to become concrete enough to feel like they matter. It eventually leads to an epic showdown that acts as a strong climax for the game, but the 25+ hour runtime makes it feel like it takes a bit too long to get there.

Given Musashi’s desire to get rid of the gauntlet and be free of this quest, a lot of the story feels lackluster as he’s complaining about what he has to do. While he has a goofy demeanor that brings charm to his performance, it felt like his surrounding cast of characters had more of a story arc than he did. This makes the story lack a strong driving force outside of how fun it is to get into fights, giving more of the emotional moments to NPCs.

This aimless structure to the narrative bled into the quest design, which featured a hub area that felt like a mini-open world, littered with things to collect and side quests to complete. The side quests were rarely satisfying, often just involving someone asking you to do something that ends up being either clearing out some monsters or closing a rift, and the collectibles were rarely well-hidden, making acquiring them just an exercise in going to a marked location on a map. Many of the more traditional levels you go to had interesting layouts and light puzzle solving that showed some of its Resident Evil-inspired roots, but going through the open world was never quite as compelling.

A Worthy Return For Onimusha

Even with complaints about the narrative, the massive level of polish applied to every part of the presentation makes it hard not to get drawn in by the end. The sweeping adventure music brings so much life to sequences, making boss fights and cutscenes more exciting. The great voice acting brings fairly stereotypical characters to life with loads of personality. It all looks sharp and runs buttery smooth, even on a base PS5.

The best of all is the polish on combat, which is brought to life by amazing visual and sound effects that make every sword clash and perfect dodge feel rewarding. After 25 hours, I would triumphantly whisper “hell yeah” to myself under my breath when I nailed a parry as the scrape of the swords blasted out of my speakers, sparks flying everywhere.

At one point in the game, a character tells Musashi that “detours are part of any journey,” and that’s a bit how I felt during my time with Onimusha. As much as the story took turns that felt uninteresting or uninspired, getting there still felt satisfying thanks to the precise and exhilarating combat. The game would have benefited from trimming some fat, cutting out some of the repeated boss fights and rift cleansing busy work, but if you enjoy the moment-to-moment samurai swordplay as much as I do, Onimusha: Way of the Sword is a journey that’s well worth the detours.

Code provided by publisher. Onimusha: Way of the Sword launches September 4 for PlayStation 5, the Xbox Series, the Nintendo Switch 2, and PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store.

The post ‘Onimusha: Way of the Sword’ Review: Capcom Revives a Samurai Classic With Satisfying Swordplay Action appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

It quickly became one of my most anticipated games of the year.

I’m glad to say that The Blood of Dawnwalker really sticks the nail in the coffin here. With a charming cast of characters, this choose-your-own-adventure-style dark fantasy game is one of the best RPGs of 2026, if you can stomach some repetitive combat and annoying performance issues along the way.

In medieval Europe, Coen’s village lives under the rule of the Vrakhiri (vampire) Brencis, whose cursed blood miraculously cures the deadly plague going around. In return, he demands that the locals worship him. After a failed uprising, Coen is left for dead and turned by Brencis. Instead of transforming into a Vrakhiri who crumbles in sunlight, he’s transformed into a Dawnwalker, someone who is human by day and vampire by night. Now, Coen is out for revenge while rescuing his family from Brencis. It’s a really enticing setup that sets the tone for the rest of the game.

The Blood of Dawnwalker’s structure is an interesting concoction of Persona and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Coen has 30 days to rescue his family before Brencis sacrifices them, so during that timeframe, he’ll need to get stronger and recruit allies. Each activity, such as completing side quests or restoring broken shrines to activate new fast travel points across the open-world map, takes up certain segments of time.

This is where the Persona comparison kicks in, as similarly in that game, you have to manage your time going to school and attending extracurriculars, while fighting bad guys. I enjoyed having the freedom to decide what I wanted to do and where.

But where The Blood of Dawnwalker separates itself is Coen’s dual nature. He can complete activities during the day and night, whereas other social simulation games like Persona primarily have you conduct them during the day and then go to sleep at night. 30 days initially might not seem like a lot, but having the luxury of an entire 24 hours immensely helps alleviate decision paralysis.

The Blood of Dawnwalker is also reminiscent of Breath of the Wild in that you can take on the Big Bad whenever you feel ready. There’s no predetermined story or quest structure, but there are a few that open up different ways to approach his throne, and that impacts which allies will join Coen. You don’t even have to use up all 30 days! With the pick-your-own-path structure along with the open-endedness approach to storytelling, The Blood of Dawnwalker’s pacing is unique in that it doesn’t rush you, and you can flesh out Coen’s tale at your own pace.

Throughout the journey, Coen will meet other like-minded individuals who also want to take down Brencis, while also learning their backstories. Another Vrakhiri named Lacra has a tragic past involving Brencis, while Crake, the leader of a rebel group, is estranged from his family. Upon discovering why, it is heartbreaking as well. These interactions between Coen and his allies rely on him drawing from his own humanity and sympathizing with them, which is why he’s such a likable protagonist.

Another notably strong aspect of the writing is that despite having the day and night, and human and vampire dichotomy everywhere, The Blood of Dawnwalker doesn’t railroad players with a morality system like a game like Mass Effect or Infamous would. You’re given the freedom to respond as nicely or rudely in any given situation without the fear of negative or positive karma. Nobody is perfectly altruistic, and Coen perfectly reflects that.

In combat, Coen has access to three different ability trees: Witchcraft, Swordmastery, and Vampirism. While Witchcraft and Vampirism can only be used by Coen’s human and vampire forms, respectively, Swordmastery is shared. You have to learn how to master both combat styles, with Swordmastery providing some broad overlap. This way, the combat constantly switches up, keeping it largely fresh.

Since dialogue choices aren’t moralized, the abilities trees aren’t either, which is a smart approach. This provides unparalleled autonomy to pick the skills and abilities I want without having to limit myself. I’m able to simultaneously sprinkle magic pixie dust on my sword to reflect enemy attacks by day, while biting into their necks by night!

There is some repetition in the moment-to-moment combat, however. It utilizes an omnidirectional system similar to that of Kingdom Come: Deliverance and For Honor. You can move the control stick in four directions to determine where your attacks will land, and if you guard at the last moment in the direction of an enemy’s attack, you’ll parry it. Once you get used to this system, it flows well, but it gets monotonous quickly since that omnidirectional combat is a bulk of what you’ll be dishing out.

Thankfully, combat is mostly unabated by performance issues. I played on Xbox Series X, and some of the loading times were longer than I would’ve liked. I also stumbled across some glitches that ranged from amusing to downright concerning. There were a few instances where an enemy’s animation entirely froze. So I’d fight a completely still person or animal, but they were still swinging at me from different directions, and it was difficult to tell which, making it considerably harder to parry or block. Additionally, environmental assets like trees and rocks would often suddenly pop in during cutscenes, which was quite distracting.

Occasionally, the save system would randomly stop working too. Auto-saves wouldn’t trigger, and the option to manually save was grayed out in the menu. The only remedy I found was to reload a previous save, which would undo any progress I had made up until that point. It was frustrating, but I managed to live with it by obsessively saving my game every 15-20 minutes.

While the combat can be tedious at times, the bevy of moments with strong characters and sharp writing constantly overshadow any problems that The Blood of Dawnwalker may have had. And some post-launch patches should fix most of its performance woes. The exceptional flexibility the game offers that allows players to forge their own paths with a plethora of unpredictable branching narratives is truly compelling.

In an era of modern RPGs, The Blood of Dawnwalker is the alpha leading the wolf pack.

Review code provided by the publisher. The Blood of Dawnwalker launches on September 3 for PS5, Xbox Series, and PC via Steam.

The post ‘The Blood of Dawnwalker’ Review: One of 2026’s Best RPGs Lets You Forge Your Own Vampire Legend appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

However, there have recently been some inventive anthology experiments that have earned The Simpsons the benefit of the doubt, like the Ray Bradbury-inspired “Treehouse of Horror Presents: Simpsons Wicked This Way Comes.” 

The Simpsons developing their own sci-fi equivalent to Black Mirror is a no-brainer, and so it’s encouraging to see the concept receive its own Disney+ special, rather than simply being a segment in a “Treehouse of Horror” episode. That being said, with only two stories in the episode, it feels like “Yellow Mirror“ doesn’t fully commit to the bit. Past Disney+ specials have been double-episodes so that their concepts can cover more ground, like in “Extreme Makeover: Homer Edition.“

“Yellow Mirror” would be able to really thrive if there was a third story present. That being said, the two stories that are told – particularly the first segment – are solid enough to warrant “Yellow Mirror” becoming a regular tradition for The Simpsons that allows it to flex its sci-fi muscles more. It’s a successful proof of concept that leaves the audience wanting more.

The episode’s first story, “The Way We Wasn’t,” is an incredibly strong Simpsons story that returns to one of the series’ most celebrated episodes, “The Way We Was.” It’s a reality-shattering premise that deconstructs Homer’s relationship with the rest of his family and how they’re an essential emotional anchor.

Carolyn Omine is especially skilled at compassionate and bittersweet Simpsons episodes, whether it’s “A Mid-Childhood Night’s Dream,” “Ice Cream of Margie (with the Light Blue Hair),” and even “Halloween of Horror.” Omine doesn’t hold back in “The Way We Wasn’t,” and it reaches surprising emotional heights in only 12 minutes. 

It’s a painful meditation on regret where Homer mourns and is haunted by a life that he never had. It’s absolutely gutting and a reminder of how much pathos and empathy The Simpsons can have when it wants to dig deeper into its characters. “The Way We Wasn’t” gradually evolves into a meta commentary on The Simpsons as a whole. Homer transforms into a Matt Groening analogue who takes great lengths to recreate his “lost family” and their hundreds of adventures together.

Homer’s abject sadness is the story’s focus, but this is also an angry, cathartic analysis of The Simpsons’ legacy. “The Way We Wasn’t” is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but it’s actually quite acid-tongued in its execution. It’s a compelling look at an alternate timeline that also feels like The Simpsons working through its own identity crisis and fleeting apathy. 

“Yellow Mirror’s” second story, “I Have No Tablet But I Must Stream,” is a much more conventional take on what one would expect from a Black Mirror parody. Maggie’s growing reliance on an AI-fueled tablet triggers a toxic codependency that spreads throughout Springfield’s infants. “I Have No Tablet But I Must Stream” is a decent commentary on tech addiction, targeted ads, and artificial intelligence that’s willing to go to some dark places. It’s a relevant story, but one that feels half-baked and predictable in its execution. 

The message in this story, while strong, has a lot of generic padding between its multiple musical segments that function as alluring siren songs. “I Have No Tablet But I Must Stream” makes its point. However, there’s room for an extra layer of techno-paranoia that could have been explored or, alternatively, a condensed take on this story so that a third segment could be included. This story works in a vacuum, but it doesn’t help that The Simpsons has already tackled this topic in a more substantial manner in Season 31’s “Screenless.“ Sure, “Screenless” didn’t build to a potential AI apocalypse, but it had more to say and goes deeper on the subject. 

The most frustrating thing about “I Have No Tablet But I Must Stream” is that it drags down the genuine greatness of “The Way We Wasn’t.” It’s unfortunate that an equally compelling concept couldn’t be cracked for the second installment, which would make “Yellow Mirror” a real triumph. It makes sense that The Simpsons would turn to a sillier and more frivolous story to balance out “The Way We Wasn’t” gutting emotional depths. It still needs to bring more to the table.

“Yellow Mirror” is ultimately a successful episode that pulls at the audience’s heartstrings and is just as interested in leaving them emotionally wrecked as it is in pushing tech-based terror. It’s fun, if not fairly disposable, which is often the case with anthology episodes. In this sense, the episode is the perfect type of experiment for a special on a separate streaming service. It doesn’t necessarily justify its existence or why these couldn’t have just been “Treehouse of Horror” segments.

At the same time, I’d like to see what The Simpsons does with future “Yellow Mirror” installments. There’s lots of potential here, especially during a time in which sci-fi anthologies seem to have greater value than horror detours.

The exclusive episode of “The Simpsons: Yellow Mirror” is available to stream as of today, August 26, only on Disney+.

The post ‘The Simpsons: Yellow Mirror’ Review: A Bleak & Brutal ‘Black Mirror’ Parody appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

In the real world, however, each of these five novels was deeply influenced by the time during which they were written, with Pargin bringing up the edgy cynicism of the ’90s Clinton era which informed John Dies at the End and the post-9/11 paranoia from the first sequel.

This willingness to engage with the current zeitgeist may result in some interesting continuity issues when you consider that these characters have remained more or less static for nearly three decades at this point, but it also means that each novel in the series has something unique to say about the state of the world despite a consistent core of dick jokes and Lovecraftian terror. I bring this up because I honestly thought that, after five completely unique books (featuring situations ranging from apocalyptic zombie outbreaks to perception-altering parasites), there couldn’t possibly be any more interesting ideas left for Pargin to explore in the strange town of Undisclosed.

That’s why I was so surprised when There Are No Giant Crabs in This Novel: A Novel of Giant Crabs turned out to be such a fresh genre-bending romp even if it can’t help but revisit some familiar concepts from the series’ past.

In Pargin’s latest cheekily titled story, we once again follow Dave, his girlfriend Amy and their best friend John as they become embroiled in an interdimensional mystery. This time, a “log” of compressed human body parts inexplicably materializes on the snowy front lawn of an Undisclosed resident during a particularly bad winter, leading the cops to call in the local paranormal “experts” for help. It doesn’t take long for things to escalate as opposing forces in an interdimensional war attempt to fight over our main characters’ attention in a gnarly conflict involving mind control, genetic predestination and, unsurprisingly, gigantic crabs.

As is usually the case with Pargin’s books, the supernatural part of the story is merely an over-the-top setup meant to ease you into a discussion about real-world issues and the occasional instance of potty humor. While I won’t spoil the deeper themes behind the interdimensional shenanigans here, suffice to say that the series once again hits the nail on the head when it comes to getting to the bottom of current societal issues while still feeling like a legitimately interesting cosmic horror yarn.

The narrative never gets bogged down with ham-fisted messaging or soap-box monologue moments (something that Pargin has struggled with in some of his other book series), as our main characters are well-developed enough to feel more like real people instead of avatars meant to parrot a certain point of view. Not only that, but the story itself is still genuinely entertaining even if you remove the social commentary motivating it, especially since it’s only during the latter half of the book that the mechanical assassins and dystopian alternate universes start to make sense.

The jokes also remain delightfully crude as they’ve always been, though I appreciate how many of the gags tie back to established character traits and how our characters see the world. For instance, the entire subplot about how a mutant lizard creature may or may not be one of our main characters in disguise manages to explore Dave’s codependency issues without ever feeling like a downer therapy session. In fact, the jumping between different points of view is one of the novel’s most consistent sources of humor, especially when John’s sections feel like they came from a completely different style of book – though the excerpts from Dr. Marconi’s publications remain the most fascinating segments of the story.

One strange aspect of the reading experience comes from how Pargin deals with callbacks to the rest of the series. For instance, while I’m aware that each of these books is meant to be a standalone adventure that can be read without knowing anything about the other novels, it feels a little strange that the characters don’t seem to notice how the mechanism through which one of the main villains is purifying his reality seems eerily similar to a plot point from the original John Dies at the End.

That being said, most of these inconsistencies can be excused due to the fact that the characters themselves admit to playing fast and loose with continuity in order to avoid legal trouble. I also appreciate existing references to the other books like how the group occasionally alludes to Dave’s hilarious double life as the local BATMANTIS??? cryptid, an idea that was introduced nearly a decade ago in What the Hell Did I Just Read?.

As I mentioned earlier in this review, I had already reached a point where I was unsure about where Pargin could take this story next if he chooses to continue the John, Dave and Amy series. And while I thoroughly enjoyed this new entry in the long-running franchise, it was only when I reached the final pages of the latest release that it dawned on me how the standalone nature of each novel, combined with the excellent character work that has been there from the very beginning, make each new book feel less like an additional chapter in an over-arching story and more like simply catching up with good friends that you haven’t seen in a while.

There Are No Giant Crabs in This Novel occasionally stumbles, with the narrative recycling some of the interdimensional and interpersonal drama from previous books and having less to say about the nature of American poverty due to the crew’s newfound stable employment, but there’s more than enough heart behind this eldritch horror-comedy to keep you coming back for more absurdist humor and over-the-top gore page after page.

That’s why I’m of the opinion that Pargin can keep this series going for as long as he wants. Or at least for as long as he can before the human race inevitably evolves into monstrous crustaceans.

There Are No Giant Crabs in This Novel is available now for pre-order and will be hitting store shelves on November 3, 2026.

The post ‘There Are No Giant Crabs in This Novel’ Review: Another Excellent Cosmic Horror-Comedy by Jason Pargin appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

At the same time, power fantasies are a huge part of what makes gaming such an addictive medium, and you can only keep players cowering in fear for so long before they start to get frustrated and want to fight back. That’s why I was so interested in Asobo Studios’ Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, an action-heavy prequel/spin-off to the studio’s previous medieval stealth horror duology.

Starring Sophia, a young smuggler who was first introduced in A Plague Tale: Requiem, Resonance tells a (more-or-less) standalone yarn about the secrets contained in a mysterious island connected to Greek mythology. Of course, the biggest difference here is the fact that Sophia is an accomplished duelist, with her swashbuckling skills turning this into a much more aggressive experience than the previous Plague Tale games.

In Resonance, we accompany Sophia (voiced and motion-captured by Anna Demetriou) from her days as a young child being experimented on in a convent all the way to her young adulthood as a fledgling member of a clan of treasure-hunting plunderers. Haunted by visions of a mysterious island in the Mediterranean containing untold riches and indescribable horrors, Sophia’s abilities inspire costly expeditions to the place that seems to have inspired the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur. When an unexpected betrayal leads to Sophia and her partner Leni being forced to explore the island for themselves, the duo discovers that whatever eldritch horror lurks beneath the ruined kingdom of Minos is much scarier than a mere bull-headed creature.

The narrative experience here is just as in-depth as it is in the previous Plague Tale games, with the main difference being that Sophia is a much more badass protagonist than Amicia. Her backstory as a roguish treasure hunter with a fondness for blades turns Resonance into more of a historical thriller in line with Tomb Raider or even the Brendan Fraser Mummy movies rather than the medieval Survival Horror of previous games.

The Mediterranean setting and dual timelines introduced by Sophia’s connection to Theseus (not to mention the excellent soundtrack) also provide the title with a completely different atmosphere despite also taking place in the Middle Ages.

In practice, these changes mean that you’ll spend the majority of your time traversing huge, and often beautifully rendered, Mediterranean environments through over-the-top climbing and jumping while occasionally solving Indiana Jones-style puzzles. Of course, the meat of the experience is the completely revamped combat system that plays out like a simplified yet more fluid version of the recent Assassin’s Creed games.

It’s only much later in the experience that the game introduces its surprisingly robust horror elements in the form of the Minotaur stealth and chase sequences. Re-imagined as a serpentine growth lurking deep in the tunnels beneath the island, this seemingly unkillable entity only retreats when confronted with sunlight and is responsible for some of the most harrowing moments in the game – even if Sophia’s medieval parkour and surprising resistance to scripted fall damage make her a little too badass for these scenes to feel scary.

In fact, there are plenty of exaggerated elements here that distance the title from the more somber world presented to us in the previous Plague Tale games. From the larger-than-life architecture of the island to the trope-heavy side characters that feel more in line with Dungeons & Dragons than a historical recreation, Resonance could very easily have wound up as a juvenile mess were it not for the story’s solid emotional foundation.

Sophia’s loss of her father and subsequent abandonment issues are genuinely touching, and the tragic relationship between this incarnation of Theseus and the so-called Bull of Minos is an unexpected highlight of the experience. I won’t get into details in order to avoid spoilers, but suffice to say that the thematic connections to previous Plague Tale titles are really appreciated even if they’ll be lost on newcomers.

Unfortunately, those same narrative connections also hinder Resonance’s main draw as a standalone spin-off. There’s some vital information missing here that you need in order to fully appreciate the game’s story, but you’ll only know everything if you’re already familiar with the rest of the franchise. In the days of easily accessible wikis and walkthroughs, this isn’t exactly a deal breaker, but I would have appreciated it if the story could have fulfilled its promise of standing completely on its own.

In terms of gameplay, my only real gripe with the experience is the fact that the title overstays its welcome by a solid couple of hours or so. The final sections of the game may still be thrilling, but they’re also needlessly repetitive when you consider that the campaign is aiming towards the brief yet memorable set-pieces of the last few Tomb Raider games rather than the drawn-out exploration of something like The Witcher.

At the end of the day, Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is a thrilling journey through another time and place that replaces its predecessors’ reliance on pure horror with a more cinematic sense of adventure. This approach doesn’t always feel like an improvement, though the Lovecraftian reimagining of the Minotaur ended up being my favorite part of the experience. But when the stars align and Resonance combines gorgeous visuals with smooth gameplay, it’s hard to imagine that this high-octane period piece was produced by the same folks who used to helm the Microsoft Flight Simulator games.

That being said, I highly recommend studying up on previous entries in the Plague Tale series before heading in, as, like Sophia herself, there’s a lot more to Resonance than initially meets the eye.

Review code provided by publisher. Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy launches on the Xbox Series, Day One with Xbox Game Pass, as well as PlayStation 5 and Steam on August 27.

The post ‘Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy’ Review: A Thrilling Action Spin-Off That Trades Horror For Adventure appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Its charm is that it doles out tiny snapshots of slice-of-life mundanity through many separate vignettes. It’s a franchise that doesn’t squander its found footage format and specifically leans into it to punctuate its scares. A stage version of Paranormal Activity immediately loses the found footage artifice, yet this production brilliantly emulates the experience and creates something that’s just as powerful and even more creative.

The play, written by Levi Holloway (The Grey House) and directed by Felix Barrett (Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More), effortlessly and innovatively taps into the film franchise’s visceral fears and mounting dread that slowly reaches a terrifying fever pitch. This is all beautifully magnified through the raw theatrical experience that pushes the show’s greatest moments even further than what’s possible in the movies. It’s like you’re trapped in the house with these characters and spirits. It’s the scariest show on Broadway.

Paranormal Activity is wise to tell an original story with fresh characters, rather than simply adapt one of the franchise’s existing films with revised scares. The framework to these films is always rather simplistic. They’re movies that benefit from minimalism, and in this sense, this production certainly doesn’t reinvent the wheel. Newlyweds James (Travis A. Knight) and Lou (Cher Álvarez) move to London from Chicago for a fresh start. However, strange activity in their new home begins to wear them both down and exacerbate existing vulnerabilities within their marriage. As reality breaks and trust becomes more important than ever, it’s unclear if James and Lou – let alone their marriage – will survive these paranormal attacks. 

It’s a solid enough setup that allows for emotional backstory and opportunities for these characters to be victimized by this demonic spirit both separately and together. Paranormal Activity’s intentionally pedestrian protagonists are meant to be conduits for unnerving set pieces and spectral events, which are in strong supply here. The show is two hours and ten minutes long, with intermission, which gives it enough time for its terrors to successfully evolve with pacing that’s on par with the films. It’s an incredibly economical script in which not a single line of dialogue is wasted. Seemingly innocuous digressions all connect together to serve the grander paranormal picture.

Knight and Álvarez have such natural chemistry and their performances are perfectly tuned to this tonal balancing act. They know how to ramp up the terror when it’s appropriate and then how to defuse that tension through affable everyday behavior. Knight and Álvarez never feel too theatrical, and the performances ring true to the more naturalistic work that’s done in the earliest Paranormal Activity films. Álvarez in particular delivers such a captivating, fragile performance.

There’s deep-seated trauma for both characters that bubbles up to the surface and makes sure that the play succeeds as a grief-stricken drama just as much as it works as horror. James and Lou are wading through dread even before anything supernatural strikes. Their story argues that life is just one big paranormal experience for some people. 

A stage version of Paranormal Activity could be tackled from all sorts of different angles. This production absolutely nails it with its inventive set design, which is presented as a multi-room cross-section that conditions the audience to be looking at several places at once. It’s a rather brilliant way to emulate the film franchise’s found footage surveillance aesthetic, only it’s the audience’s attention that dictates which room becomes their focus. It’s a visual setup that properly conveys the terrifying feeling that the entire house is constantly vulnerable.

A wide range of tricks bring sinister set pieces to life. Moving shadows and visual hallucinations are fun tools to creep out the audience. The same is true for the excellent sound design that amplifies every gesture and at times bombards the audience like an inescapable sonic explosion. There are other, more elaborate scares that truly feel like magic tricks. Paranormal Activity is such a remarkable accomplishment in practical effects, the likes of which really push boundaries here. The pacing and execution are no different than some big-budget horror movie.

There are certain stage plays that feature all these elements, but ultimately lack genuine scares. Paranormal Activity is brilliant on a technical level. It’s also deeply frightening and doesn’t hold back in this department. It’s the scariest production I’ve ever seen on stage (which includes the comparable, creepy poltergeist play, 2:22 A Ghost Story), and it’s a show that just works. The audience’s reaction to the scares was far bigger than I’ve ever experienced in a movie theater, which is really saying something. This production seamlessly translates the blockbuster horror experience to the stage, complete with standout jump scares and a pitch-perfect ending that stays true to the franchise’s nihilism.

Paranormal Activity is exceptional in every regard. It’s both daring and different, but also a faithful portrayal of what this franchise represents. It holds its own with the franchise’s best entries, and it’s not just some lazy attempt to cash in on one of horror’s most lucrative franchises. It’s the scariest that Paranormal Activity has been in well over a decade and such a satisfying extrapolation of this series that still has its own identity.

It’s a must-watch experience for horror fans that will hopefully continue to expand and reach a larger audience; as many people as possible need to feel like they’re being attacked by sinister spirits and to get lost in Paranormal Activity’s bone-chilling beauty. 

Paranormal Activity: A New Story Live on Stage opened on Broadway on August 25.

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The film’s title is the first clue, referring to the bioengineered mold that communicates and operates like a hive mind. It can also regenerate dead tissue. The biotech company that engineered it is giving a presentation at a medical conference in a Korean high-rise facility when disgruntled, crazed employee Seo Young-chul (Koo Hyo-hwan) confronts the company’s CEO in his private office, injecting him with the mold. It unleashes a deadly outbreak that quickly spreads. With the building under lockdown, survivors band together in a desperate bid to escape.

Writer and director Yeon Sang-ho once again assembles an ensemble of personalities thrust into a nightmarish scenario of twitching, fast-moving infected. While not the most fleshed out beyond protagonist Kwon Se-jeong (Jun Ji-hyun), a prickly loner-type with the necessary smarts to survive, there’s enough contrasting personalities on display to inject plenty of suspense and drama in an increasingly goopy, gory zombie siege.

As such, Colony constantly questions what it means to be human, to have an identity. It’s most overt when focused on the evolving infection; what begins as a familiar, rudimentary outbreak slowly transforms into an organized hive of fungus, goo, and contorting bodies moving as one. These zombies learn, and they learn fast. It becomes an effective, and often gross, visual metaphor for the alarmingly rapid spread of AI and the emptiness of using it to replace human thought and emotions.

It’s also reflected in the compelling heroine Se-Jeong, a strong-willed scientist so steadfast in her independence that her ex-husband Han (Go Soo) knows she’ll have a hard time finding a job without his direct intervention. As the foremost character resolving to think for herself, Se-Jeong becomes both an observant exposition deliverer and fierce final girl in a battle of wits against the cartoon villainy of Young-chul.

While this premise comes with all the familiar hallmarks of zombie outbreaks, from noble sacrifices to repetitive zombie logic, Sang-ho compensates with constant pulse-pounding action and increasingly intricate set pieces. Colony may take place in a high-rise, but Sang-ho makes full use of space, zipping survivors through offices, a shopping mall, operational facilities, and more, culminating in a showstopping finale so wild and complex in stunt work that it drives his AI metaphor to impressive new heights.

Even his zombies get an upgrade here. The mutating mold develops in stages, adding a fascinating new wrinkle, of course, but what makes these zombies so compelling is their collective movement. Choreographer Jeon Young assembles a horde of contortionists and dancers to play the zombies, all twitching, crawling, and attacking in unison. How that evolves, along with the infected’s unique “information exchange” among themselves, ensures that Colony rises above its familiar beats and tropes.

Colony wears its Romero influence on its sleeves, but with purpose. Plenty of zombie stories, as far back as Night of the Living Dead, see hope dwindle when human conflict and clashing personalities derail teamwork in the face of death. While that makes Colony too beholden to the familiar beats at parts, it’s also a clever reflection of our current societal approach to AI. It’s Sang-ho’s biggest film yet in scale and production value, even if sometimes unwieldy with ambition.

Sang-ho pushes his zombie legacy forward in a propulsive, thrilling new film that doesn’t reinvent the formula, but instead repurposes it for digestible social commentary. More importantly, the subtext never undermines the horror mechanics; Colony never forgets to entertain through kinetic horror action, a visceral new infection, and classic zombie thrills.

Colony releases in theaters on August 28, 2026.

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Bury the Devil from director/producer Adam O’Brien is the latest horror film to attempt this gambit, and it mostly pays off. Brimming with stylistic flourishes that help to overcome an uneven and sometimes rote script, this is one-take horror that holds its tension and its scares over the course of one horrifying night. 

The film unfolds almost entirely in real time, beginning with a hellish opening shot and then flashing back to “75 minutes earlier” inside an isolated lake house. Here we meet Julia (Emmanuelle Lussier Martinez), a home health worker who’s just taken a job caring for dementia patient Evelyn (Dawn Ford). It’s a normal gig at first, as Julia reminisces with Evelyn about her daughter, tucks her into bed, and then sets out to get the house in order. When Evelyn wanders back out of bed and asks why a strange woman is in her house, it’s still just part of the job, and Julia’s composure is relatively unshaken by the big empty house with its many little candles and cavernous old rooms.

But soon Evelyn’s nighttime wanderings will take on a more sinister tone. Something is wrong in this house, and if Julia’s going to survive the night, she has to find out what really happened to Evelyn’s daughter. 

This premise pays immediate dividends, helped along by O’Brien’s firm grasp on his one-take, real-time concept. Cinematographer Benoit Beaulieu lights the house in wonderfully atmospheric ways, creating just enough darkness to get us anxious and leave us searching the shadows for clues without ever rendering the film murky or difficult to watch. Of course, the usual motion sickness caution applies with a film like this, but Beaulieu and O’Brien have clearly risen to meet this technical challenge, crafting a film with flavors of The House of the Devil and Relic even as it sets out on its own path. 

As the title suggests, this is a demonic horror movie, and the emotional arc it brings within the confines of that subgenre is, if not surprising, then at least clearly stated and consistent. As an elderly woman with dementia, Evelyn can often seem like she’s not herself, and the way she blips in and out of her own reality, her mind trying to sort through a tangle of memories and confusion and static, weighs on Julia, twisting her reality until the whole house feels like a kind of pocket universe of evil.

The production design helps with this, blending touches of the Gothic with the kind of classic wood-paneled lake house vibe so many of us recognize, but the camera is also key. As it follows Julia from room to room, sometimes catching a glimpse of Evelyn in a darkened hallway or lingering somewhere unexpected, you get the sense that another presence is there, another character with their own desires beyond simply watching what unfolds. The tension is steel drum tight, and it works, at least until the narrative grows a bit more complicated.

Credit where it’s due: The film’s script, credited to Brad Hodson and John Petrizzi, has a very clear arc running throughout. They keep the primary narrative thrust clear, they pay off what they set up, and they throw in lots of demonic mayhem along the way. Where the film started to lose me, even if it was only temporary, was in the sometimes stale depiction of the demonic and what it means not just for Evelyn, but for those in her life who seem to slowly realize what she’s becoming.

Characters speak like real people, and feel like real people, in one scene, then morph into archetypes the next, losing some of the film’s momentum for the sake of laying out lore that might be better left a tad more ambiguous. The main narrative is only 75 minutes long (the entire film is only about 10 minutes longer than that, with credits), so time is a precious commodity, but at times the film dispenses with elegant solutions to its narrative problems and simply bludgeons the audience with exposition.

Clues to its supernatural mysteries appear a little too easily, and arrive in predictable ways. Even the camera occasionally gets caught up in something overly formulaic, taking the idea that it can simply spin around characters as they talk to dizzying (literally) extremes. The effort to maintain visual dynamism and narrative efficiency is admirable, but it doesn’t always pay off.

Fortunately, the chamber piece nature of the story allows plenty of room for the performances to carry things through, and it’s here that Martinez and Ford shine. Ford, a character actor with a long string of high-profile voice acting roles to her name, dives into the various shades of Evelyn with frenzied enthusiasm, while Martinez plays a woman with secrets of her own, slowly unraveling under the weight of fresh revelations and dangers. Together they make a remarkable duo, and you almost wish the film was just slightly longer to allow for a little more character work. 

One-take horror is always a gamble, but for Bury the Devil, it pays off more than it doesn’t. The story’s not quite all the way there, and the camera work sometimes devolves into the needlessly frenetic, but this is still a remarkably tense, brutal piece of work that goes for the throat and, despite loosening its grip now and then, never lets go. 

Bury the Devil is in select theaters and on VOD August 21. 

The post ‘Bury the Devil’ Review: A Tense One-Take Horror Experiment That Mostly Pays Off appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

After an effective cold open that introduces a young Gemma dealing with the traumatic and terrifying loss of her mom, a sequence that sets the stage for the overarching narrative, Out of the Further skips ahead 20 years to reintroduce a grown Gemma (Amelia Eve), now a single mom herself. To say that Gemma has severe hangups from her childhood trauma would be an understatement; even she knows it, though she tries her best to keep it under control for the sake of her daughter Maya (Island Austin).

Because this is an Insidious movie, Gemma begins suffering disturbing dreams straight away. Nightmares that bleed into her waking life, causing her to lose track of time and raise questions about her own sanity. Worse, she can bring things back from her dreams. Instead of professional help, as her boyfriend Nick (Brandon Perea) would probably prefer, Gemma turns to the Further’s ultimate hero, Elise (Lin Shaye), for spiritual guidance against the creepy cult leader Cyrus (Sam Spruell), who has sinister plans for Gemma’s unique gift.

Though even Elise has a dramatically reduced presence in this sequel, maybe a few minutes total longer than her brief cameo in the previous film. It’s tattoo artist slash spiritualist Clare (Maisie Richardson-Sellers) who subs in for an absent Specs and Tucker, serving as a mouthpiece in our world for necessary exposition delivery that’s essentially on autopilot at this stage. So much so that the famous line “it’s not the house that’s haunted” gets repurposed here as shorthand in a fast-moving sequel rushing through the franchise’s greatest hits. 

Out of the Further only seems to have eyes for its ghostly denizens and their haunted house antics. The former is this sequel’s biggest strength. Spruell’s Cyrus ranks high among the series’ most unsettling foes and puts his cult leadership to eerie use, and comes armed with loyal followers to do his bidding. As if that’s not enough, this sequel also packs in five films’ worth of undead cameos; blink, and you’re likely to miss some of your fave Insidious baddies and ghosts.

Director Jacob Chase (Come Play) nails a few memorable scare sequences that’ll leave you squirming, though many are already heavily covered in marketing materials. Gemma’s descent into a liminal Backrooms-like pillow-fort and a nerve-fraying, gross-out dental cleaning from Hell are the two knockout set pieces worth the price of admission. The sound design is admirably repulsive. Beyond that, though, Insidious falls into a repetitive, less effective rhythm that leaves the human characters frustratingly helpless. 

Eve is affable enough, but Out of the Further leaves her stranded in damsel mode for far too long despite telling us over and over again that she’s far more powerful than the Lamberts. That her gift borrows from Nancy Thompson, a much tougher final girl, doesn’t help. The closer Cyrus gets, and the more Gemma loses time, the messier this sequel gets as it shortchanges its central (tired) theme of cyclical trauma. Maya never convincingly factors into the events until the climax, for example, making the deterioration of her relationship with her mother more disjointed than devastating. 

Insidious: Out of the Further adds enough spooky fun and Further frights to the mix to keep it moving along at a rapid clip, therefore ensuring it never overstays its welcome. It also doesn’t ever take itself too seriously, even leaning into silly playfulness in parts. But you know exactly how it’ll play out long before Gemma does.

The sixth entry might unnerve franchise newcomers, but otherwise it feels like a speed run through a familiar and mostly repetitive haunted house.

Insidious: Out of the Further releases in theaters on August 21.

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An unnerving, psychosexual horror film with a touch of the metaphysical and a few choice moments of body horror madness, Blood Shine is the next step forward for Bennett and Brooks’s creative and personal partnership. It doesn’t always hit the mark, but its ambition, visual beauty, and genuinely unnerving narrative help to make it another compelling outing from some of indie horror’s finest. 

Bennett, who also co-wrote the film, stars as Clara, a woman living in seclusion on a farm in upstate New York. Clara’s seclusion is very much by design, and not just because she enjoys being alone. As a member of a secretive, esoteric cult which worships light itself, she leads an ascetic life, pushing away her baser urges in the hope of one day escaping the prison of her body and joining the light. 

Clara’s solitude is broken when horror filmmaker Brighton West (David Call) drops into her life. Brighton was once the hottest new director in the genre, but now he’s trapped in franchise purgatory, producing sequels he doesn’t want to make instead of passion projects that he can’t get out of his head. To fulfill his obligations to the studio, he heads upstate to finish his latest script, only to encounter Clara, who promptly locks him away and subjects him to a series of bizarre, painful rituals, initiating him into her world for her own purposes.

The more Brighton bleeds, the more they bleed together, the more the unlikely pair form a strange, dangerous bond. 

This setup primes the film to function largely – aside from scene-stealing guest star appearances from indie horror legends like Larry Fessenden and Toby Poser – as a two-person play, with much of the action unfolding in a single room where Brighton waits each day for Clara’s next ritual. Bennett and Brooks’ script is brimming with confidence in this setup, and works especially well when it contrasts Clara’s dominant stance inside Brighton’s prison with her uncertainty, fear, and perceived impurity outside of that power dynamic.

If there’s a weak point in the script, it’s that it sometimes feels like it’s spinning its wheels in this regard, keeping Clara in one emotional space a bit too long in order to facilitate the next big leap forward, but these are passing concerns. This is a smart piece of storytelling not just in terms of what’s scripted, but in terms of how much the film seems to trust its performers.

It’s here that Bennett gets to really show her paces as an actor, and she delivers what might be the best performance I’ve ever seen from her as a woman on the brink of a breakthrough who’s nevertheless tortured by past failures, present urges, and a zealous streak that’s cost her any chance at a normal life. She simmers with these emotions, lets them roil over her face and then pushes them back. It’s remarkable work, and Call matches her beat for beat, playing a man with an undeniable misogynist streak who finally has to not just feel, but understand what it’s like on the other side of the power imbalance. Together they make for a consistently compelling pair, even when the script occasionally stumbles. 

Visually, too, Blood Shine manages to, well, shine. Light is, naturally, a key motif for a film like this, but Bennett and Brooks don’t simply go for the obvious and bathe their characters in sun. After all, for light to matter, darkness also has to be present, and so the sun cuts through the frame like a knife, jetting out into dark rooms in controlled beams from carefully placed windows. Then, the directors take the light’s metaphorical presence even deeper by making the connection between light and filmmaking, and the ways in which filmmakers are able to harness the power of light to tell stories. Within that thematic throughline, the film does some very unnerving things visually, and that’s before the blood and body horror kick in. When things get messy, Bennett and Brooks lose none of their visual flair, turning the film’s violence into a maelstrom of faith, lust, and epiphany. 

Blood Shine has its stumbles, particularly in the middle as the narrative sort of swirls around itself in search of an exit, waiting for the third act to uncoil, but what it lacks in narrative clarity it more than makes up for in sheer emotional and visceral force. Two of indie horror’s rising stars just got brighter, and I can’t wait to see what Bennett and Brooks make next.

Blood Shine arrives August 21 in theaters and on Digital.

The post ‘Blood Shine’ Review: Ambitious Psychosexual Cult Horror Fueled by Faith and Body Horror appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

The central foursome couldn’t be further apart in personality and aim. The blue collar type of the bunch and unspoken leader, Tyler (Mitchell Cole), skipped college altogether and brags about his HVAC work. Pals Day (Akira Jackson) and Fisher (Noah Toth) don’t seem to have any direction post-college, yet that doesn’t seem to bother the more free-spirited pair either. That often leaves them both exposed to the derision of James (Phinehas Yoon), a prickly, aloof type that seems to have outgrown his friends long before their doomed road trip. There’s an effortlessness to their camaraderie and occasional antagonism, establishing a lived-in history before the realization sets in that they’re stuck in some bizarre backwoods purgatory.

Alexander Ullom kicks things off with intensity, the first act a frenzy of terror with rapid cuts and heightened emotion that comes with being dropped into the deep end of the unknown. But the longer the road wears on and the group becomes accustomed to the bizarre workings of this road, the shock fades into a calm sense of normality as collaborate to find answers. It’s this shifting of gears that lets Ullom’s existential metaphor take root in fascinating ways.

There are no easy answers to be found on this road, as is the case with life. Instead, Ullom looks inward, with James feeling more like an avatar in a deeply personal story of a young man coming to grips with being suddenly thrust into adulthood and whether he can do it alone. As each member of the group takes agency on how to deal with their seemingly permanent reality, James emerges as the focal point. Yoon’s performance makes for a fascinating anchor in this inscrutable world; James’ soft interior is closely guarded by a defensive plate of armor that masks his emotions.

Because it’s so ambitious in concept and lofty in its ideas, the middle section does meander in parts, unhelped by the severe slowdown in intensity. That Ullom steadfastly refuses to explain the inner workings of this mysterious dilemma, preferring to let the metaphor speak for itself, is also a move that’s likely to frustrate. Still, the filmmaker finds ways to keep the single location visually interesting, and the ultimate destination- if you can call it such- rings genuine and inventive. 

It Ends captures a universal fear, that anxiety-inducing transition into full-blown adulthood where we’re all expected to become responsible contributors to society. It’s a lot of pressure with no clear guide. As such, it runs through every emotion that comes with that journey. It’s a vibe movie that shifts through a variety of genres, ultimately settling on an authentic form of catharsis. One keenly aware that life is weird, inexplicable, often scary as hell, and impossible to get through without someone in your corner. 

It Ends made its world premiere at SXSW and releases in NYC & LA theaters on August 21 before expanding wide on August 28.

Editor’s Note: This SXSW review was originally published on March 9, 2025.

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Though its roots will always lie in the story of a masked killer in a clown costume slaughtering people in brutal ways, Cesare’s three previous books in the series each reached for different subgenres, giving the author a chance to play with conspiracy thrillers, folk horror, and more while still playing with the slasher elements that made the first book and its subsequent film adaptation such a hit. 

Which is why, at first glance, the fourth Clown book, Lights! Camera! Frendo!, might seem like a little bit of a step backwards. Trust me when I tell you it’s an illusion.

By stepping back to where it all started with the story of an in-universe movie adaptation, Cesare’s not only able to look at his own series in a new way, but push his instincts for classic slasher storytelling in new directions, creating a book that’s both a blast to read and a reflective trip down memory lane for longtime readers.

With Quinn Maybrook dead (or is she?) after the events of the third book, the new film shifts the action to a new final girl, the one playing Quinn Maybrook in the first movie based on the Kettle Springs Massacre. Sabrina Alvarez is a nobody, an actor plucked from obscurity to play Quinn alongside a cast of other, more established young actors in supporting roles. When we meet her, she’s still learning the ropes, trying to build up her toughness with the goal of pleasing big-shot director David Frank Hansen, and earning the respect of her co-stars. 

To make things even more intimidating, the cast and crew have descended on the real Kettle Springs for on-location shooting, where survivors of the original massacre and its brutal aftermath still remember exactly what happened. Characters like Rust Vance, Cole Hill, and Jerri Shaw, all major players in previous books, are hanging around the production with their own roles to play off-screen, which means that Sabrina really has to get it right if she wants to please everyone.

But of course, you can’t please everybody, especially whoever’s trying to sabotage the movie, leaving a trail of bodies in their wake.

One of the great strengths of the Clown sequels thus far has been Cesare’s ability to deliver the slasher goods while also reaching outside of the comfort of the formula to try new things. Lights! Camera! Frendo! is, conceptually at least, a creative obstacle in that path. How do you do something new when you’re literally taking your readers and your characters back to the story that started it all, as the cast and crew of the new film, including Cole as a producer and Jerri hanging around the shoot, try to restage the life-changing slaughter that forms the basis for the movie? How does talking about all the deaths from the original book, then dramatizing them, make for a sense of newness? 

Cesare finds a way, and that way is paved with his own reflections on exactly where the story’s gone so far and what that means. This is a writer who just watched a film adaptation of his own story, with all the compromises and tweaks and new directions that entails, reflecting on who exactly gets to tell this story and why.

Is it the actor who wants to do the lead role justice, the survivors who want to try to rebuild their lives while honoring what happened before, the writer who’s constantly reshaping his own creation? The book never veers all the way into metafiction, nor does it pivot to Hollywood satire, but with wit and wisdom, Cesare explores all the juicy nooks and crannies of these questions, while delivering another runaway train of a slasher story. 

I’m a little bit of a mark for these books, I’ll admit, in part because Cesare’s knowledge of the slasher genre is vast and nuanced. He’s the kind of writer who could fire off a new slasher story based on the tried and true formulas in a heartbeat, and that kind of comfort in the space lets him push further, break the formula apart, turn it around so we can look at it from new sides.

The kills in Lights! Camera! Frendo! reflect this, as Cesare plays with our expectations to create new, brutal ways for his characters to die, while infusing each new death with meaning, ratcheting up the tension, until the third act explodes in tense uncertainty. As a fellow slasher devotee, it kept me guessing, and that’s saying something. 

If you’ve followed the Clown in a Cornfield saga up to now, you probably don’t need me to convince you that you should pick up the next installment, but that doesn’t change how much fun it is. Lights! Camera! Frendo! both fits right into the larger series and pushes its boundaries with a jolt of fresh creativity that hits like a knife in the dark. It’s a blast.

Lights! Camera! Frendo! is now available wherever books are sold as of today, August 18.

The post ‘Clown in a Cornfield 4: Lights! Camera! Frendo!’ Review: A Bloody Return to Kettle Springs appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

But even that’s not the end of what Wendig is after here. The Calamities, like many of Wendig’s best books, is a vast machine laden with mythology and secrets just waiting to be uncovered, and along the way, Wendig’s straightforward entry point into the world morphs into an epic laden with monstrous, deliciously menacing energy. 

Mourning Mayne is returning home at the behest of his father, the imposing and powerful Hadrian Mayne, for reasons he doesn’t yet know. Born into one of the most prominent “Fiend” (read = humans with ancient demon blood) families in North America, Mourning’s spent much of his adult life partying, trying to stay away from his father’s spiderweb of machinations in world politics, industry, and society. But something is different on this visit home.

Mourning’s father seems different, distracted, and soon Mourning is swept up in a massive conspiracy that threatens the entire power structure of the Fiend families around the globe. With those he truly cares about in danger, Mourning has no choice but to dig deeper into the mysteries of his family, but what he finds will threaten more than just the Fiends. 

The very concept of the Fiends, who function as both a global concern interwoven into the halls of power and as a fascinating cross between medieval feudalism and the American Mafia, might be our way into the story, but it’s not the real spine of it. That comes when Mourning’s journey moves outward, away from the Mayne family home and into a vast conspiracy thriller featuring a freelance soul-buyer, a eunuch enforcer in service to one of the smaller Fiend families, an old flame, and a young nonbinary person swept up in dark forces they don’t understand.

Each of these characters brings their own perspective and life to the story, and they add dynamism and warmth to this dark tale, particularly when it comes to the way Wendig builds out his world. 

Because our way in to The Calamities is Mourning, who knows all the traditions and lore in which he was raised already, Wendig does not spoonfeed all the rules and hierarchies of this world to us in the form of long exposition drops. Instead, we get to know the world of the Fiends slowly, in a narrative that puts the characters first. Strange new terminology drops into conversation, planted like a dark seed that will sprout and fruit in later chapters. Allegiances emerge slowly, shift quickly, and pivot based on emotional decisions, not necessarily political ones. It’s a great way to lay out a world like this, and Wendig’s ability to lace the book with lore without ever grinding the narrative to a halt for page after page of explanation keeps The Calamities moving. 

Through books like The Book of Accidents, Wanderers, and more, Wendig has proven adept at marshalling a vast cast of characters through a story of epic scope, but The Calamities is only the first step of this particular journey. The overall saga, known as The Fiends, will run into a second book, and this installment ends with a hell of a cliffhanger, setting characters off on new paths as larger evils lurk.

That means that, in the grand scheme of the story, this is actually a ramp-up, a long climb to a big reveal that also functions as an addictive introduction to a world and a set of characters. There’s something remarkably intimate about this book, despite the grandness of its plot, and that comes from Wendig exploring, with no reservations, what happens when bad people are trying to do the right thing. Mourning and his friends and allies are literally born this way, their demon blood coaxing things out of them that mere mortals couldn’t dream of, and the choice put to these characters is not whether or not they’ll stay evil or do good, but how they’ll use their gifts in a world that’s already gone to Hell (not quite literally, in this case).

These questions hang over the whole book like smoke, and they infuse The Calamities with even more compelling layers. This is a sharp, witty, absorbing novel from one of our finest genre writers, and it moves like a bat out of Hell. 

The Calamities is available August 18 wherever books are sold. 

The post ‘The Calamities’ Book Review: Horror Meets ‘Succession’ In Chuck Wendig’s Demonic Epic appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

That’s not to say that 2019’s The Sinking City was a bad game, but the first attempt at a moody investigative thriller set in flooded environment was clearly marred by budgetary issues, overambition and even a prolonged legal battle between Frogwares and the title’s initial publisher. These problems resulted in fans receiving a decidedly worse version of the experience at launch, though a much improved (but still flawed) remastered edition of the game was finally released last year.

Yet, for all its missteps, the original game still contained all the hallmarks of a legitimately great Frogwares production, from excellent writing to faithful recreations of Lovecraft’s eldritch mythology as well as a genuinely kick-ass premise.

Fast forward to 2026 and in spite of a myriad of real world issues interfering with the sequel’s release. including a literal war that put the Ukrainian developers at risk, copious amounts of fan support coupled with good old-fashioned perseverance resulted in a brand new game that completely overshadows its janky predecessor.

In The Sinking City 2, which is a standalone adventure set during the roaring 20s, players take on the role of Private Investigator Calvin Rafferty as he refuses to evacuate the flooding city of Arkham, Massachusetts in order to try and save his catatonic lover, Faye. Faye’s body has been lying dormant since a mysterious incident that occurred while exploring the mystical Dreamlands, and Calvin’s only hope of waking her up lies in conducting an occult ritual that may very well be connected to the disaster currently destroying the city.

Flooded Arkham Is the Real Star of the Show

In gameplay terms, this results in the player having to explore flooded sections of Arkham while scrounging for supplies and fighting eldritch threats brought on by the rising tide – threats which include dead bodies reanimated by slithering eel-like creatures as well as the occasional waterlogged monster. Along the way, you’ll also solve intricate puzzles and investigate the secrets behind Faye’s predicament, all the while learning more about the city’s ill-fated inhabitants and their own attempts at escaping the flood.

Compared to the first game, the biggest difference here is in the overall approach to the material. Despite the surface-level similarities in the third-person traversal and combat, The Sinking City 2 is much more of a traditional survival horror experience than the proto-open world RPG hybrid we saw in the original.

This means that the new title feels much more linear, though it also results in a much more focused and tightly-paced experience.

Even then, Arkham feels even more massive and imposing than the previous game’s Oakmont despite your exploration being limited to a handful of ruined buildings and neighborhoods. While part of this is due to the apocalyptic scale of the conflict here, as the flood takes the form of an ongoing (and oddly beautiful) cataclysm rather than a passive element of the setting, the meticulously-crafted level design also makis this world feel much more alive than the procedurally-generated Oakmont and its generic NPCs.

A More Focused Survival Horror Experience

This time around, the gameplay here borrows heavily from more recent takes on survival horror rather than trying to feel like an RPG. In fact, the title wears many of its influences on its sleeves as you progress through an experience that could very well have been made into a Lovecraftian-themed DLC for titles like Alan Wake 2 and even the Resident Evil 2 remake.

The Sinking City 2 isn’t quite as polished as these aforementioned titles, especially where gunplay and enemy variety are concerned, but this is still the first Frogwares release I’ve played that could possibly be referred to as a AAA production. Sure, some of the janky cut-scenes and infrequent visual hiccups can occasionally break the illusion and reveal that this isn’t a blockbuster production, but these rare blemishes pale in comparison to the quality of the overall narrative.

Frogwares has always excelled at Lovecraftian intrigue, and their latest release marks the first time that one of their carefully crafted yarns isn’t locked behind frustrating deduction mechanics and antiquated exploration. That makes it much easier to appreciate the genuine pathos behind our protagonist’s quest.

There’s something undeniably compelling about a lone hero who decides to defy nature itself during a hellish catastrophe so that he might save the person he loves – no matter the cost. In classic Cosmic Horror fashion, things turn out to be much more complicated (and terrifying) than that, but I love how the title grounds speculative ideas from classic tales like The Shadow Over Innsmouth and At The Mountains of Madness with a deeply resonant emotional core.

And while you don’t necessarily have to be an expert on H.P. Lovecraft’s expansive mythology to keep up with the narrative here, hardcore mythos fans are sure to enjoy the many references and Easter eggs that help to flesh out Arkham and its inhabitants.

Final Verdict: A Love Letter to H.P. Lovecraft Fans

At the end of the day, The Sinking City 2 doesn’t quite reinvent the survival horror wheel with its familiar attempts at inventory management and desperate combat, but that doesn’t make it any less entertaining. While some players may be put off by the old-fashioned backtracking and repetitive combat encounters, I’d argue that these retro elements only make the game seem more like the ideal Lovecraftian survival horror title that I’ve been dreaming of ever since playing Bethesda’s Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth all the way back in 2005.

That’s why I believe your overall enjoyment of the game will likely depend on your existing fondness for its source material, especially since the story hits the ground running and expects you to be familiar with concepts like the Dreamlands and the fishy children of Dagon.

However, it’s precisely details like these that make me appreciate The Sinking City 2 as a horrific love-letter to all-things Lovecraft.

Review code provided by publisher. The Sinking City 2 launches August 18 for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store.

The post ‘The Sinking City 2’ Review: A Superior Sequel And Compelling Love Letter to H.P. Lovecraft appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

While I never got too deep into it, I will always remember it for a bit of writing in the beginning that hit the FromSoft tone in a way I rarely see. There was a moment where you go up to a vessel, and a prompt comes up that says “Sip the Divine Tar.” It’s a succinctly ominous phrase that immediately feels full of lore and meaning without actually saying much at all, just like the best parts of Dark Souls, Elden Ring, or Bloodborne.

Mortal Shell felt like a great start for a new team, even if it wasn’t quite the most robust experience. It had clever new twists and an interesting world, and now Mortal Shell II has come out and not only retained that great vibe they set in the first one, but also improved its mechanics and level design in ways that make this one of the best non-FromSoft soulslikes I’ve played.

Right from the beginning, there’s a lot of delicious proper nouns thrown your way. The Undermether falls from the sky, leaving her remains to be worshipped, with temples carved from her bones. You play the Harbinger, a being that has been prophesied to aid her by recovering her lost Ova, ensuring a future for her unborn offspring. Hearing the opening narration describe this setup is like an extended divine tar moment, with all the details making me smile with a sick pleasure.

After the narration, you’re dropped into a rural village that seems to be in the middle of a Midsommar-esque ceremony centered on you. There’s a creature named Ruk, who looks like a normal, but large, bird at first glance, until you realize that his open mouth contains a human skull at the back of it, which is his actual face. He will be your cryptic guide throughout the game, showing up to offer you ominous words of encouragement.

There’s a tutorial section that introduces you to your first Shell, before ripping it away from you after an epic first boss fight; then you’re dropped in the middle of an open world, with only vague directions to guide your way.

An Open World That Rewards Exploration

This structure quickly became the most compelling part of the game for me. From your home base at Marrow Keep, another perfect-sounding name, you can travel to a select number of beacons, Mortal Shell’s version of the classic bonfire, but the map isn’t filled out. Dotted across the blank canvas are bird icons, which denote places you’ll find Ruk to receive that area’s map section.

As you explore, more things will become marked on your map, including six massive gates where you’ll find the six main bosses of the game, which the denizens of Marrow Keep call the Ovum Thieves. The more Ova you collect, the more you progress the game’s story, with the final section being unlocked by defeating all six Ovum Thieves.

To start, you can only fast travel from Marrow Keep to a few different beacons, which has one of the coolest fast travel animations I’ve ever seen where you’re launched through the sky like a burning comet, giving you a good starting point to begin exploring. Finding the map pieces is a good first objective, and you slowly learn how to solve the game’s navigational puzzles of determining the route to a specific location.

It can be tricky because sometimes there are gates that will warp you across canyons, and those connections aren’t clearly marked on the map, but knowing that can give you theories to test out to get around. Certain zones of the map also have too much space between beacons, making it extra troubling when you’re running around for a long time between rests trying to find where you’re going. There’s a fine line between frustration and fun when getting around the map is so core to the challenge, but Mortal Shell II lands on fun more often than not.

In addition to the gates, the world feels dense with things to discover, without getting overwhelmingly large. Each of the beacons you run across can be cleansed of corruption, which involves going into a little dungeon and rewards you with more Ova. Other dungeons that you come across have different rewards, from upgrade materials to new weapons. You’ll also be able to add new weapons or shells to your map by talking to various people at Marrow Keep, giving you more breadcrumbs to chase after.

Much like Elden Ring, if you find yourself having trouble with one area, there’s plenty of other directions you can explore to continue to level up your character. Never once did I feel overwhelmed by the map, and I always felt like I had at least one path forward I could see to make progress.

The titular hook of the game that sets it apart from other soulslikes is its shell system, which acts sort of like swappable character classes. The Harbinger starts the game as sort of a blank human, which can fight, but doesn’t have any particular skills. To become stronger, he inhabits the bodies of various lost warriors, which need to be collected as you explore. Some of them were just waiting for me at specific locations across the map, while others had more side quests or interactions associated with their acquisition. Each of these warriors has a unique set of skills, and in some cases, unique mechanics for health recovery.

Shells Change the Way You Fight

For example, Tiel, my most used shell, had the ability to Shadow Step and become invisible to enemies, dealing a powerful sneak attack. He could also slip into the shadows any time he did a perfect dodge, rewarding you for focusing on dodging over parries. Another interesting one was Gragu, who replaced the traditional Dark Souls-style healing system (having a limited number of healing charges until you rest) with the ability to recharge a weaker heal resource through killing enemies.

This meant that he, in theory, could indefinitely collect healing charges and never have to rest, but would have to deal with those charges being less effective. It’s really compelling to experiment with each of these playstyles, and a lot of fun can be mined finding different shells for different purposes.

The shell system also has a neat second chance mechanic attached to it. When your shell runs out of hit points, you’re returned to Harbinger’s blank human form with a sick animation that feels impactful every time. If you run out of HP in this form, then you die and respawn at your last beacon, but if you do enough damage, you’re able to regain your shell form, returning all your abilities to you and allowing you to continue on. For a game that can get really challenging, it’s a nice little safety net for you to have that makes a fight feel really desperate and rewarding when you succeed.

While your abilities are defined by your shell, most of the combat rhythm will come down to the weapon you choose. Some weapons are quicker than others, but overall Mortal Shell II has a very chunky and deliberate pace to its combat, which is one of its greatest strengths. There’s no stamina management, so it all comes down to timing and spacing, making for compelling fights that you can rarely button mash your way through.

It was not uncommon to approach an encounter too casually and find myself kicked out of my shell within moments, and I loved it for that. Just like shells, it was fun to figure out which weapon fit my playstyle, equipping different ones for different types of fights.

Combat Hits With Brutal Precision

In addition to your melee weapon, you also have a sidearm that can be used for ranged combat. These are never your primary damage-dealing options, but it’s definitely worth exploring because they all feel very different and complement your arsenal in meaningful ways. My favorite was the lute, which seemed like a pretty silly inclusion when I saw it in the trailers, but was critical to my strategy, as it cast confusion on enemies and caused them to fight one another. I loved how tactically it made me think, figuring out which monsters I should confuse and which ones I should isolate and fight.

One of the other signature elements of the game is the harden mechanic, which can replace the standard parry depending on which seal you have equipped. You’ll start with two seals at the beginning, but more can be gathered as you go, and they change your defensive options. The parry seals do allow for a traditional soulslike experience, doing stagger damage to enemies when you successfully time a block, but the harden seal was way more fun for me. Instead of using a standard block, your character briefly turns to stone in the middle of whatever move they’re doing, making them immune to damage.

Time it right, and it will do stagger damage like a parry, but the exciting part is that when you un-harden, you continue with whatever action you were in the middle of. Hardening mid-combo makes you feel like a total badass, shrugging off an enemy attack during an ax swing and delivering a devastating blow as you finish the attack.

Going along with the very brutal feel to the combat are excellent execution animations. When you do enough stagger damage to enemies, they will become vulnerable, allowing you to perform a devastating move not unlike DOOM’s glory kills, though they are not guaranteed to be fatal. Combined with the game’s heavy use of blood splatter, it makes Mortal Shell II feel more savage and vicious in a satisfying way that sets it apart. Each creature has its own unique execution animation, which often involves using their own weapon against them or repeatedly stabbing them with your dagger. Unfortunately, there were several instances throughout where the animation of your character and the enemy wouldn’t sync up properly, but when it worked, these were always a fun treat.

Building Your Perfect Harbinger

Aside from your weapons and shells, there are other ways to modify your build. Through your exploration, you’ll find a plethora of Tarstones which can be used for various purposes. Many of them will give you the option to add elemental damage to your attacks, while others will give you completely different skills. They each have limitations on which weapons they can be equipped with, so your options will always depend on your loadout.

There are also consumable items you can find, which can be equipped for either active or passive effects. Usually they have a limited number of uses that will reset when you rest, and the more of them you collect, the more the items improve. While I did enjoy ones that acted as additional healing items, my favorite summoned a huge bear-like beast to my side to fight with me for a little bit, giving me a valuable tool for my arsenal.

All these can be leveled up as you go, either at beacons or in Marrow Keep. Gloom, which is acquired by killing enemies and needs to be picked up from where you died, is used to level up the Harbinger, which will provide some base level boosts no matter which shell is equipped. At certain Harbinger levels, you’ll be awarded shell points that can be spent on specific shells, allowing you to purchase extra modifiers that make the core abilities more useful.

There’s a blacksmith who operates an infernal machine that will upgrade your weapons and tarstones using specific materials. All these provide a nice power curve throughout, even if it feels like improvement comes more from your skill and pattern recognition than from the actual stats.

My favorite upgrades in Marrow Keep came from the mysterious woman who kept the shells. In exchange for a resource called Glimpse, she can strengthen the bond you have with your shell, which not only gives them a stat increase, but also provides access to the shell’s memories. This allows you to get a sense of who they were before they became your vessel, giving you both a focused character study and an extra glimpse at the world as a whole. Some of my favorite details about Mortal Shell II’s world were gleaned from these scenes, and I valued them more than any mechanical level up the game provided.

A World Overflowing With Weirdness

You’re going to need all the help you can get, because the game has a wide variety of enemies that are not only well-designed visually, but challenge you each in their own ways. While some of them are pretty standard medieval knights or brutish creatures, there are some deeply weird and creepy enemies mixed in. It was always a joy to get to a new location and find out what strange denizens lurked within, learning their patterns until you’re able to deal with them effectively.

There might be a little more repetition in location theming than I’d like, especially for something so exploration-based, but the world looks fantastic. Plenty of cliffsides have little raised circles that you can sit on, providing you an opportunity to take a break from the brutal combat and just enjoy the beautiful vistas the game provides. A solid soundtrack accompanies your exploration, enhancing it without becoming distracting, while still kicking into high gear during big encounters with some heavy metal riffs that match the game’s vibe to a T.

The surprising part about the game is that despite its doom metal tone that it gives off, it’s actually pretty funny, both with its enemy design and level layouts. There are some dungeons that almost feel like they are trolling you in a playful way, with hidden traps that act as punchlines. To contrast with the usually horrific enemy design, you’ll also run into goofier ones, like an accordion-playing old lady who comes at you with a flying dropkick.

There’s even a fakeout non-standard ending that gave me quite the chuckle. It’s the kind of humor that adds to the world through its contrast rather than breaks the world by feeling out of place, making for a richer experience overall.

A plethora of minibosses will be encountered all over, and these have a pretty wide range of quality. Some of them are just bigger or more dangerous versions of standard enemies, which feels a bit uninspired, while others can be clever bosses that are either compelling challenges or contain a mechanical or thematic trick to them. The more memorable ones included a ghost in a library archive that requires you to destroy books to make them vulnerable and a shepherd who turns a flock of docile sheep into a horde of monsters.

The most visually impressive bosses are the ones that you hunt down beyond the gates, and while I loved these fights, they also provided the largest amount of frustration with the game. Each boss comes with an epic introduction that shows off their extremely menacing design, leading to an excellent fight that felt like a true test of skill. Many of them have multiple phases, keeping you on your toes as patterns change and escalate as you progress through the battle. They feel like narratively important beings, acting as satisfying chapter markers in the game as you close the books on a specific area.

Boss Bugs Mar an Otherwise Incredible Adventure

The only issue is that, in the review build of the game, many of these bosses were pretty massively affected by technical issues. I found out late in the game from the Discord that the devs set up to chat with reviewers that there was something specific about the lute weapon that I was using that would cause the enemy AI to break, making them stop in their tracks and just take hits unresponsively until they died. Even after switching out my build to prevent that, I found some of the bosses, particularly in the endgame section that follows the defeat of the six main bosses, to still have issues with their behavior in ways that made them attack nothing or stop altogether.

There was one particular boss where if you did the execution attack on them while they were staggered, the synced animation would throw you out of the arena if you were too close to the edge, killing you instantly by no fault of your own. It felt deeply disappointing that I didn’t get to experience these bosses as intended, both for my own enjoyment and for my ability to speak on their overall challenge level definitively.

Cold Symmetry said they had a day one patch that both fixes bugs and adjusts the balance of the bosses, and I’m extremely hopeful that fixes everything. Even with all the issues I had, I enjoyed this game so much that I would love to fire up New Game+, which unlocks after completion, and play again to unlock all the weapons and shells that I missed while also experiencing bosses in their finished form. Without playing that, I can’t speak to the difficulty balance of those encounters, but based on what I’ve played, I think they would end up being satisfyingly challenging.

Soulslike games often evolve post-launch; just look at how many times they massively tweaked boss fights in Elden Ring, so even if I had played with the day one patch, it might not be the game people are playing six months down the road.

Fortunately, if the game does skew too difficult for you, there’s a built-in “easy mode” with the Slayer Seal. In addition to adding some health regeneration, when equipped, it provides you with a charge-up punch that launches you at your enemy and does massive stagger damage, allowing you to get an advantage on even the most challenging foes of the game. It doesn’t completely diminish difficulty; you still have to time the attack well and survive during its cooldown, but it’s a great way to assist without making it an unsatisfying walk in the park.

It should be noted that equipping this will disable your achievements, which is a move I don’t love, but I do understand where they are coming from. If you’re on the opposite end and find the game too easy, there’s a night mode that can be activated in Marrow Keep that makes things more challenging while also providing you with extra rewards for your trouble.

It’s a shame that I ran into so many technical issues with the bosses, because Mortal Shell II is easily among my favorite games of the year. It nails my two favorite aspects of FromSoftware’s classics, the engrossing exploration and the ominous narrative vibes, while still having brutal, deliberate combat that made me pay attention to every encounter. Its dense world packs in so many secrets in a smaller map size that gives you the freedom to explore in any order you choose. I wrapped the main story in about 30 hours, but there’s so much hidden all over the map, including weapons and shells that will have a meaningful impact on your playstyles, that I’m definitely planning on coming back for more.

I acknowledge that it’s entirely possible that the bug fixes and balance tweaks may make the bosses too challenging, but based on the overall quality of the game, I’m confident they will be able to dial it in right.

Review code provided by publisher. Mortal Shell II launches August 20 for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC via Steam.

The post ‘Mortal Shell II’ Review: A Fantastic Soulslike Experience Despite Some Glaring Bugs appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Thankfully, some filmmakers are occasionally gifted with a rare opportunity to revisit their old projects and rework them into something more akin to what had originally been planned. The rise of popular Director’s and Extended Cuts has actually rescued plenty of genre movies from cultural obscurity, with notable examples being Exorcist III: Legion and even Nightbreed. With that in mind, it makes sense that fans were ecstatic when it was announced that Chris Carter was finally going back to his divisive 2008 film The X-Files: I Want to Believe in order to deliver a new cut of the movie that didn’t have to appease concerned shareholders who insisted on neutering the original release.

Now called The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn, Carter’s reworking of the movie restores several deleted scenes and moments of additional gore/terror that were originally cut in order to guarantee a more profitable PG-13 rating. In Carter’s words, this makes Vrach Frankenshteyn the definitive version of the picture he always wanted to make, and, based on the trailer, fans have been hoping that this new cut might finally redeem a movie that had originally been regarded as a major disappointment.

The truth, however, is a lot more nuanced than the marketing would have you believe. While Vrach Frankenshteyn is an undeniable improvement over the original cut of the film, feeling more appropriately terrifying in its speculative influences and even adding never-before-seen practical effects work into some of the freakier moments, this new version of the movie likely won’t be converting folks who weren’t already fans of the 2008 release.

In the film, we once again follow former Special Agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) as they’re recruited by the FBI in order to investigate the bizarre disappearance of a fellow operative. Aided by a disgraced priest with alleged psychic abilities (Billy Connolly), the duo soon find themselves falling down a rabbit hole of monstrous science and corrupted faith.

Despite the flick’s unfortunate reputation, I’ve always been of the opinion that much of the negative reaction to the picture had more to do with fan expectations regarding unresolved plot points from the show (mainly the convoluted web of alien conspiracies) than the overall quality of the movie itself. To put it bluntly, folks wanted another bombastic blockbuster like 1998’s Fight the Future, but what they got was decidedly less grandiose.

Even at its worst, I Want to Believe has always been at least “serviceable,” functioning like a spookier-than-usual FBI procedural drenched in a cool, snowy atmosphere. At its best, however, the movie reminds us that Carter has always been a skilled storyteller, with even his monster-of-the-week yarns simultaneously working as character studies testing the limits of Mulder and Scully’s personal beliefs – not to mention their iconic relationship.

All of that remains true in Vrach Frankenshteyn, with the film still feeling like a more polished version of a satisfying standalone episode of the show, but with the added material hinting at a greater madness lurking behind the antagonist’s plans. Things get especially interesting whenever the story is allowed to delve into the disturbing implications behind this otherwise grounded mystery, as well as the real-world experiments that inspired the titular Frankenshteyn.

Unfortunately, there simply isn’t enough new material to shine a light on what is by far the most interesting part of the movie. The added snippets of the antagonist’s animal testing and the overall body horror of his attempted transplants are appreciated, but it’s clear that, studio meddling or not, Carter never intended for this to be an all-out horror flick despite the villain’s Mary Shelley-inspired M.O.

There are also a handful of seemingly arbitrary changes that don’t really make the experience better or worse. While I appreciate the more fast-paced editing during some sequences, especially towards the beginning, the removal of gags like the hilarious nod to George Bush, which I always understood to be a reference to  9/11, actually makes the movie feel a bit too self-serious for its own good.

Thankfully, the experience is still carried by a trio of iconic performances, and I am definitely including Connolly’s highly controversial priest among them. There’s no point in praising Duchovny and Anderson for their onscreen chemistry, as the continued existence of this long-running franchise is itself a testament to their combined talents, but I’ve always thought that the fan vitriol towards Father Joe was absurdly overblown. Carter is obviously using the character to dissect the very idea of redemption and black-and-white morality in a world warped by continued cycles of violence, and Connolly’s portrayal of a regretful monster remains a bold and undeniably interesting move nearly two decades later.

At the end of the day, The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn likely won’t change your mind if you already disliked the original version of the film. However, existing fans of the movie finally have a definitive version of the experience that feels more in line with the show that gave us horrific episodes like season 4’s Home.

Just don’t go into this one expecting a brand-new mystery – though we can always hope that, if enough people watch it, we may yet see that long-awaited third movie…

The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn begins streaming on Hulu & Disney+ on August 14, 2026.

The post ‘The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn’ Review: The Same Monster With a Fresh Coat of Paint appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

The Platt family is already falling apart before the arrival of dinosaurs. Divorce is very much on the table for Greg (Ewan McGregor) and Denise Platt (Anne Hathaway), whose constant fighting has placed an unspoken strain on children Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery). Greg’s conflict-avoidant personality and precarious employment breed friction for the pragmatic Denise, whose writing dreams feel suffocated as a result. The neighbor’s beef with the family dog Starbuck isn’t helping either. The parents are so deep in their marital strife that they don’t notice their kids have issues of their own.

Enter a bizarre anomaly that forces this borderline dysfunctional family to address their problems head-on when they’re abruptly and unwittingly whisked back to an age where humans are at the very bottom of the food chain.

Mitchell, who dedicates this heartwarming and sometimes grim family adventure to his late father, proves an excellent study of ’80s Amblin films. That’s not just reflected in its more accurate period recreation, but in the distinct tonal blend that sees Denise pausing to giggle at mating herbivores one scene and nearly succumbing to catatonic shock at a brutal demise in another. That is to say that the Flowervale neighborhood quickly gets eviserated and ripped apart, often scattering the Platt family across blocks as they evade a constant barrage of attacks, but never explicitly so. Mitchell delivers just enough brutal imagery to leave a nasty mark before cutting away; this is still ultimately a family film (older kids only) after all. Cat lovers beware, though; Oak Street designates these family pets for easy dino snacks.

As for the dinosaurs themselves, Industrial Light & Magic brings an impressive variety to life in stunning detail, adhering to more historically accurate depictions. That means feathered raptors, monstrous titanoboas, and hairy sauropods, to name just a few. Mitchell ensures these predators are terrifying and vicious, but never strays too far from appreciating the novelty of dinosaurs invading the suburbs.

Working against them is the Platt family itself. It’s here where Mitchell frequently tosses logic out the window to force this family further along their journey. While each individual arc holds strong, together the Platts are prone to making plenty of blunders solely meant to place them directly in harm’s way for the impending adrenaline rush. Oak Street, in true Amblin fashion, also injects a far too tidy conclusion that undermines some of the film’s bolder choices. Starbuck, while a very good boy, is nothing more than a plot device that rarely factors into the chaos.

The End of Oak Street is classic summer blockbuster fare with big action and style, but one that doesn’t rise above its Amblin influences or break from convention. Its massive tonal swings from silly romp to dark adventure film with actual death can be as jarring as its logic inconsistencies, but Oak Street compensates with a compelling cast led by an effective Hathaway, no shortage of breathless set pieces, and terrifying dino encounters. Mitchell may struggle at points to fully channel Steven Spielberg, but his dino flick still delivers plenty of summer fun.

The End of Oak Street releases in theaters on August 14.

The post ‘The End of Oak Street’ Review: David Robert Mitchell Delivers Entertaining Amblin-Inspired Dinosaur Adventure appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

I bring this up because I’ve never been a fan of visual novels. The format has always confounded me, and even the ones that I like, such as the Danganronpa games, still feel to me like they would have been better if presented in another format. That’s why I was initially hesitant to try out Grimtaste Studio’s RUNT, a post-apocalyptic horror story presented as a refreshingly bizarre visual novel. However, the title’s grim aesthetics eventually convinced me to swallow my pride and give this new release a try.

You know what? I’m glad that I did! RUNT may not be a perfect interactive horror experience – it even suffers from many of the same common pitfalls that have previously turned me away from the genre – but there’s so much passion behind this dark and strange loop of small-town scares that I don’t think could be expressed better in any other medium.

In the game, players take on the role of the titular Runt, the youngest member of the fundamentalist Strayer family. Led by the unstable brute Hunter, this deeply troubled group of orphaned brothers has become the de facto protectors of the town of Skipclaw after the fall of civilization. Taking place in a world shrouded in perpetual darkness where everyone has to wear a mask in order to ward off eldritch abominations, the game, or rather, Hunter, forces you to investigate a message that was left on the family’s property, with the makeshift collection of rotting animal parts spelling out that the Strayers have “5 days” left before something catastrophic happens.

In gameplay terms, this means living out five in-game days as the family’s favorite whipping boy and going about daily chores (which sometimes involve quirky mini-games). Meanwhile, you’ll also speak to locals and gather clues about who might be messing with the Strayers and what exactly will happen once the five days are up. Like most visual novels, the interactive bits of the experience are light on mechanical complexity, with esoteric puzzles and timed hidden object challenges making up the bulk of the non-narrative challenge here.

There are actually many elements in RUNT that feel like they were lifted straight from the minimalist Flash Games of yesteryear. From the town map and accompanying time management that reminds me a lot of Con Artist Games’ original The Last Stand trilogy to the brief point-and-click shootouts that harken back to free-to-play horror classics from Newgrounds, you can tell that Grimtaste built the foundation of this interactive experience on casual mechanics that could seamlessly blend into the traditionally passive thrills of a standard visual novel.

Not only that, but the title’s meticulously crafted presentation manages to elevate all of these elements into a highly atmospheric ordeal that transcends the limits of a text-heavy format. Hand-crafted backdrops with diegetic menu designs, like how you literally open your bag in order to check your inventory and how the journal is all scribbled over with realistic notes, make you feel like you’re really stepping into Runt’s ill-fated shoes – especially when certain actions allow you to alter his personality in strange and often unexpected ways. There’s also an eerie degree of uncanny-ness to the designs here, as the environments feel believable while still benefiting from a distinct dream-like quality due to the unnatural lighting and digital cut-out assets.

That being said, it’s the deeply compelling story that really elevates the experience into something you probably haven’t seen before in this type of game. Nearly every single character here is written to have a rich inner life, with even the traumatized main cast benefiting from grounded psychology despite existing in such a hellish world. I found myself frequently recoiling in terror whenever Hunter entered one of his aggressive moods, and don’t even get me started on how much I wanted Carver to be the culprit just so someone could beat the shit out of the least likable brother of the bunch.

Looking back on it now, the most disturbing moments of RUNT had more to do with the brothers’ horrific childhood at the hands of their radicalist cult leader father than any of the supernatural terror. Although, even then, the writers make a point of showing that even the most monstrous people still have a tragic degree of humanity underneath all that darkness.

You’ll almost inevitably end up feeling guilty no matter who you accuse as your main suspect once the five days are up, with the title’s multiple endings providing only just enough closure to make it feel like your investigation was worthwhile even if you didn’t get all the answers.

This actually leads to my main criticism of the game, as it’s unlikely that you’ll uncover the real secret going on behind the scenes in Skipclaw during your first playthrough. You see, the title is actually built to facilitate multiple runs as you redistribute time differently and attempt to get different answers out of the townsfolk in order to achieve a new conclusion.

While I’m all for adding replay value to the game, I would have preferred it if a single run could still offer a more robust finale, especially since I’m pretty sure that the game locked me out of certain options just because I spoke to different characters in an order that the developers weren’t anticipating. That being said, the rest of the game is so solid that I don’t really mind repeating certain sections in order to get new results. The added framing of having Runt remember all this from rereading his journal in the future also helps to make the looping narrative a natural part of the experience.

That’s why I’d recommend RUNT to fans of psychological horror and post-apocalyptic fiction everywhere, as the title’s excellent writing and memorable worldbuilding make it stand apart from its visual novel peers. The repetition required to get a “true” ending may bother some folks, but I still think it’s worth engaging with this unique horror yarn even if you don’t plan on uncovering every single secret that haunts the Strayer family.

Review code provided by publisher. RUNT launches August 10 on PC via Steam.

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While you’ll play as several characters throughout the two-and-a-half-hour runtime of The Skin Stapler, the main character is Dick Slater, a jaded detective on the case of the increasingly violent titular serial killer. Saddled with a rookie partner he resents, he follows a trail of bodies to his inevitable confrontation with the sadistic murderer, who seems to be oddly obsessed with him. It’s a pretty basic setup, but there’s plenty of personality with its over-the-top detective flick tone riddled with sexual humor.

The game plays out over a series of fourteen short chapters that are either part of the investigation or depicting The Skin Stapler’s killing spree. Both styles of chapter are pretty light on gameplay, mostly asking you to walk around a small area and do a series of tasks, but they definitely each have their own feel to them in ways that provide a bit of narrative variety, even if mechanics are a touch repetitive.

My favorite parts of the game were playing as the eventual victims of the killer, acting out their final moments before The Skin Stapler springs his trap and viciously murders them. These sequences do a great job of painting the setting of 1984 Carrion City, a rotten town populated by absolute weirdos. Everyone you play as has just enough personality in both their character design and performance, mining various tropes for all they’re worth.

After the opening sequence of playing a victim killed in her apartment, which is probably the most outright tense chapter in the game, the game casts you as characters going about their daily jobs, interacting with the dregs of the city that visit them.

Everyone’s a Victim

What makes this cool is that each job has its own little task you perform while working there as the shift gets more and more sinister. You’ll be making hot dogs at the convenience store, filling donuts at the donut shop, or rewinding tapes at the video rental store. Each of them has a multistep process that needs to be figured out and performed correctly, oftentimes involving a quick time event that’s required to progress.

It’s never super mechanically complex, but I’ve written before about how I like process games that require you to follow directions, and this evokes that just enough. It does feel like each of them lasts one customer too long, wearing out their welcome due to their relative simplicity, so I wish there was a bit of escalation or variation to make it more fun throughout.

The job sections of the game highlight one of the game’s biggest features, its sense of humor, which will probably be a deciding factor in how you feel about this game. Pretty much every customer that comes by will say something that’s absolutely drenched in crude innuendo, and the game has no shame about its crassness. The humor is definitely full of low-hanging fruit, everything from jokes about wanting wieners or needing to get their hands on your hot cream filling.

Despite knowing what type of game this was going to be, I was still rolling my eyes at many of the jokes, but by the end I came around to it, finding it funny how direct they were with the sex puns. There were still plenty of jokes that didn’t land for me, but I found myself charmed instead of annoyed, and your tastes may vary on this drastically.

Following the Killer’s Trail

I don’t think any of these sequences build tension as well as the opening scene, but they do a good job of setting up the web of characters in this part of the city. Usually the character you’re playing will have a friend come in to talk to them during their shift, and then you play as that character or meet them again later down the line, efficiently creating the sense of a larger world. If nothing else, the scenes where you play as the victims have some sort of jump scare or creepy speech, effectively showcasing the over-the-top methods of The Skin Stapler.

After someone gets brutally murdered, you’ll come in as the detective to investigate the crime scene. Each time, the killer leaves a strange message for you that’s locked in some way, and you need to pick up objects around the scene and search for evidence hidden on them to unlock it. This usually involves just interacting with the item and rotating it around a bit to check if it’s hiding a photo slide or a tarot card or whatever themed clues he’s hiding, so once again it’s not mechanically complex, but it does do a good job of forcing you to fully investigate the scene and take in the brutal handiwork of the killer.

It’s great to see the same spaces after they are turned into a slaughterhouse, with large pieces of skin stapled to the walls near a body displayed in all its gruesome glory. A few of these scenes feature some very light puzzle solving, but they are mostly just used to push forward the game’s narrative.

Straight-to-VHS Presentation

To my surprise, the game was fully voice acted, and everyone involved understood the assignment. It’s clear they were trying to evoke the cheesy voice acting of bad late-night horror movies, but fortunately that’s something I find charming rather than offputting. I was also shocked to see that several of the cutscenes were actually well-directed, with interesting angles that made them feel more manic and off-kilter in the exact way the best B-movies do. It’s not perfect; some of the performances work better than others, and there was a weird issue with the subtitles disappearing before the characters were finished speaking, but sometimes it even felt like the flaws were feeding into the so-bad-it’s-good tone.

I wish the narrative had a bit more to it, but it doesn’t really seem like they were going for anything particularly deep. The Skin Stapler himself was a pretty standard “crazy killer” type, even if he had a couple good lines here and there. Overall, the story is definitely just a vehicle to get you from one location to the next and then splattering gore all over. Feels like something you’d tune into late night while surfing cable and initially scoff at, but end up sitting down and watching the whole thing anyway.

Its charm is in large part due to the presentation, which perfectly utilizes that low-poly aesthetic to make every area look awful in the best possible way. The gnarly gore never feels too graphic, thanks to the indistinct look of the PSX-style visuals, making it feel more playful than mean-spirited. There’s also a great John Carpenter-esque soundtrack throughout with some great squishy sound effects that punctuate both the violence and the gross tasks in equal measure.

To add one final cherry on top, there are some great VHS-style FMV sequences peppered throughout, which is something that always works for me.

I think you’ll know if The Skin Stapler’s brand of late-night grindhouse humor is going to work for you just from watching the trailer. While it could use more mechanical or narrative depth, its full dedication to the bit is undeniably charming. It’s a gruesome good time that fans of games like Sniper Killer or Rewind or Die will enjoy, but it’s an acquired taste that might not be for everyone. Depending on how you feel about jokes like “you’re looking a little stiff, Dick,” you could probably raise or lower this rating by one skull.

Review code provided by publisher. The Skin Stapler is available now on PC via Steam and GOG.

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That’s legendary writer/director Abel Ferrara, in one of the new interviews shot for Vinegar Syndrome’s 4K release of his cult classic Body Snatchers, the third major cinematic iteration of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

It’s a rare studio movie outing for Ferrara, and as we learn through the disc’s many special features, it was often an adjustment for the exploitation icon to learn where the guardrails were with Warner Bros. Pictures. The result is a film with a sometimes confused tone, but as this new 4K restoration reveals, Body Snatchers is also so much more: a Gen-X ode to nonconformity wrapped in a gritty sci-fi horror skin. It’s essential Ferrara, and it’s finally getting the boutique 4K treatment it deserves. 

As Ferrara outlines in his interview, he didn’t necessarily want to set the film on a military base, but previous drafts of the script from writers like Larry Cohen and Stuart Gordon meant that he and writer Nicholas St. John had to stick with it, shooting at an Alabama military base with help from the real armed forces (because Warner Bros. has that kinda pull). The original story is set in an everybody-knows-everybody kind of small town, while Philip Kaufman’s incredible remake is set within a scientific community in San Francisco.

Ferrara, lacking that kind of intimacy between characters, instead makes his film a story about a family already fraying at the edges, and what happens when an all-consuming alien force starts trying to pull them apart even more. 

The military base setting, which allows Ferrara to play with long takes and anamorphic lenses to great effect amid the fencing and identical barracks, creates a sense of deep loneliness for the protagonist, teenager Marti (Gabrielle Anwar), who’s dragged reluctantly along with her Dad (Terry Kinney), stepmom (Meg Tilly), and stepbrother (Reilly Murphy). Marti’s Dad Steve works with the EPA, and he’s taking samples in all the places where the government stored its many chemicals and other weapons, checking to see how much might have leached into the soil, the air, or the water. Meanwhile, Marti starts to bond with the base commander’s (R. Lee Ermey) daughter, Jenn (Christine Elise), the base’s resident nonconformist.

On the surface, Ferrara is playing with some very basic, familiar elements to anyone who’s seen things like The X-Files, which debuted the same year, or other conspiracy thrillers of the ’80s and ’90s. The government’s hiding something, the soldiers are suspicious, there’s no fun to be had, and the stress of constantly moving is really getting to Marti, who’d rather be on her own than stuck with the woman who “replaced” her mom. Ferrara starts the movie, wisely, with a strange, violent encounter with what seems like a deluded soldier in a gas station bathroom, adding to the grit and the grime of the production. It creates an immediate jolt, and Ferrara keeps you on edge throughout the rest of the film before finally dialing the bombast up to 11 in a finale that showcases Warner Bros.’ budget for the film. 

It doesn’t always work. I personally think the ending is a bit scattered and a bit too concerned with one-upping itself several times to produce a satisfying emotional conclusion, but Body Snatchers works because Ferrara knows exactly how to scare, how to titillate, and how to keep us on edge, something showcased brilliantly with this restoration. The grit of his production, the feeling of being stranded on a crumbling military base with nothing but a local bar to provide distraction, is baked into every frame, beautifully preserved and highlighted by the restorers.

The light also looks wonderful, particularly toward the end, when Ferrara uses searchlights and spotlights – the harsh light of military surveillance – to shoot through blinds like bright blades. It looks gorgeous, and given how hard this film was to find for so long, it’s about time we got to see it like this. 

The special features, including a wonderful deep dive into the film’s production in a commentary track by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, all add to the feeling, outlined by Ferrara himself, that he was basically getting away with something when he made this picture. There are moments that have a pure, low-budget exploitation soul, all dissolving corpses and tangled root-like tentacles, and that feels like vintage Ferrara, something the interviews underline.

My only real gripe is that we don’t get more of these cast and crew stories, particularly with Ferrara himself. I could listen to him tell war stories from movie sets, punctuated by the occasional “Ya dig?,” for hours. 

Vinegar Syndrome as a label is at its best when it’s shining a fresh spotlight not just on films that were nearly lost or underseen, but films that feel like a true feat of moviemaking which went largely unnoticed and unappreciated for years after its release. Body Snatchers is one of those movies, not a perfect film but a wonderful blend of studio thriller and Ferrara’s gnarly, relentless artist’s soul.

Now, we get to see it the way it was meant to be seen, and as is so often the case with pod person stories and their timeless studies of paranoia and assimilation, it’s as relevant now as it was 33 years ago. 

Body Snatchers is now available in 4K UHD from Vinegar Syndrome. 

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A famous opening quote from Arthur C. Clarke that precedes the introduction to Jason Delgado (Wagner Moura), fishing off a Seattle pier, is the only hint at what’s in store for the Delgado family for much of the film.

That’s because soon after Jason returns home, we meet his wife Riley (Greta Lee), son Graham (Noah Alexander Sosnowski), and younger daughter Ruth (Riley Chung). Their mundane dynamics are barely set, on an ordinary morning just ahead of Christmas no less, when a seemingly never-ending rainstorm blows through that somehow traps the entire block inside (or out) of their homes with unmovable force.

From here, The Last House quickly settles into a grim routine as hours become days, then weeks. Survival takes priority, leaving the outside threats on the back burner as the Delgados try to maintain their sanity and health in the face of dwindling supplies. Namely food. The script by Matthew Robinson (Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die; Love and Monsters) injects some handy conveniences; Jason happens to be an unemployed engineer, a significant asset in a post-apocalyptic or extreme unnatural setting. Their shambling home also deteriorates just enough to provide strokes of luck when they need it most, giving the family an advantage above the rest of the block. As for hope, well, that’s a constant battle among the foursome over the passage of time. 

When The Last House finally begins showing its hand, Robinson and Leterrier dangle a much more interesting film that never fully comes to pass, one that swaps in an alien threat for something much more exciting and underexplored. That yields a few thrilling action sequences and set pieces, especially as the overlong runtime finally paves the way for its final confrontation, but Robinson’s script never really detours far from the Delgados’ bid to survive intact. As such, stakes are dramatically lowered and emotional beats are constantly rushed. Not helping is that Leterrier handles the few bursts of intense sci-fi action with incomprehensible camerawork.

The most glaring issue, though, is that it’s all so happenstance and superficial. It operates on fuzzy logic, hoping that the reliably compelling Moura and Lee can retain audience investment and compensate for a lack of characterization. While both are experienced and talented enough to inject pathos despite paper-thin characters, the children have no real sense of identity whatsoever, outside of empathetic moments from Ruth with the sole purpose of foreshadowing a rather silly conclusion. 

The Last House brushes against so many interesting ideas, from climate change to lockdown isolation. It touches on community and family, of course, and, most fascinatingly, injects some Lovecraftian concepts into the mix. All teasing a much more complex and smarter feature. Leterrier and Robinson do nail their primary goal, though; the family is the only real glue holding this clumsy but somewhat serviceable lockdown thriller together.

The Louse House is now streaming on Netflix.

The post ‘The Last House’ Review: Netflix’s High-Concept Lockdown Thriller Is Trapped by Its Own Potential appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

I Saw the TV Glow filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun gives Clover’s theory their own inspired spin with Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, but not quite in the way you’d expect. Schoenbrun’s meta slasher isn’t commenting on the genre itself but rather the personal, applying Clover’s theory to a joyously blood-soaked vision of letting go and discovering the pleasures of sex. Through their protagonist’s descent into slasher mania, Schoenbrun explores their own fears through the loving lens of horror.

That’s certainly reflected in Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a director tasked with rebooting the 14-film Camp Miasma franchise. Determined to make her mark and shake things up, Kris fixates on the performance by the original film’s star and final girl, Billy (Gillian Anderson), and sets out to convince the reclusive actress to sign onto the reboot. That means venturing out to where Billy lives: the original location where Camp Miasma was filmed. Billy believes that the series’ killer, Little Death (Jack Haven), is real and still lurking around the campgrounds.

As her week with Billy wears on, deeply immersed in all things Camp Miasma, the more Kris suspects Billy may be right.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma trades the somber existential terror of Schoenbrun’s previous films in favor of light-hearted humor and, well, camp. That’s evident from the outset, which introduces the fictional film within this film and its eye-catching killer, complete with cheeky decapitations that yield geysers of blood. The killer’s name, Little Death – a poetic euphemism for an orgasm – is the first tipoff to Schoenbrun’s humorous and heartfelt intention, one that only grows sharper and more pronounced the further into delirium and self-discovery that Kris falls.

Schoenbrun salutes the greats, namely Friday the 13th and Sleepaway Camp, with reverence. That’s not just reflected in the deep lore of the fictional 14-film franchise, but in the retro-styled Camp Miasma sequences. This meta slasher heavily embraces humor, but takes its craft seriously. A stunning montage sequence midfilm unleashes Little Death for exquisite carnage upon a slew of unlucky camp counselors, with Haven making nimble work of tricky blocking and dizzying single-take camerwork while wielding a monstrously phallic weapon. All set to Counting Crows’ “A Long December.”

It’s a film that uses matte painting backdrops, practical effects, and a heavy emphasis on junk food to blur the lines between reality and film. All in service to the film’s playful tone, too. There is an argument to be made that Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is more stoner comedy than pure horror.

Above all, it’s a mesmerizing two-hander. Anderson turns in a career best performance as Billy, channeling Sunset Boulevard‘s Norma Desmond as Kris’ eccentric and challenging guide into the deep depths of Camp Miasma. Billy is the calm, aloof one of the two, often quick to light up a joint in answer to Kris’ anxious probing. It’s the pas de deux between this seemingly unlikely pair that brings much of this film’s infectious magic. The sizzling chemistry between the pair also helps.

Of course, it’s Kris who undergoes the bigger journey, beginning the film trapped in a polyamorous relationship with Mari (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and Mari’s boyfriend Thor (Aren Buchholz) before getting plunged into the deep end to confront her sexual hangups. Einbinder captures Kris’ immobilizing fears, loneliness, and vulnerability with warmth, making the eventual embrace of her own sexuality all the more rewarding. 

Once the climax arrives, though, Schoenbrun seems unsure how to finish (pun intended?), tacking on a muddled saccharine ending that veers a little too off the rails. It’s also overlong and prone to a few lulls in pacing for a film that’s fairly straightforward with a simple concept. But it is Schoenbrun’s most accessible feature yet, while sacrificing none of the artistry. Fantasy and reality blur in breathtaking, whimsical, and jubilant ways in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, using film theory as the launchpad for a dazzling sexual awakening allegory.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma releases in theaters on August 7.

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In his book The Official Guide to the King of the Monsters, he argues that the so-called “Monster Cinematic Universe” was well ahead of the curve as both a kind of proto-MCU and a mixed-media empire that successfully evolved to suit multiple formats. Yes, it may have got its start in the movies, but it wasn’t long before the scaly characters were popping up in everything from Saturday morning cartoons to theme park attractions, edutainment programming, anime, video games, and even erotica. Don’t ask!

One side-hustle that the franchise absolutely excelled at was infiltrating the comic book market. About this, Skipper writes: “The Japanese began adapting Godzilla into black-and-white manga almost from day one.”

In the early stages of this diversification, any comics that were printed tended to be straightforward novelisations of Toho’s films, changing only minor details in the translation from screen to page. While not especially creative, these faithful retellings did still serve a useful purpose. They let fans experience Big G’s exploits from the comfort of their own living rooms.

No longer would they have to wait for a theatrical re-release in order to get their fill of Godzilla duking it out with Mothra or the Xiliens. Instead, they could vicariously experience all those thrills again while sitting on the John! 

Of course, once home video became more ubiquitous, people didn’t need to turn to manga as a substitute for the real deal anymore. Which, in turn, freed up the writers to get a little bolder and to finally start telling their own stories.

Flash forward to the modern era and Godzilla comics are just fucking weird! No concept seems to be too outlandish. No crossover too absurd. No retcon too sacrilegious.

Indeed, if you’ve picked up a book from IDW lately (the custodians of the brand as far as print is concerned), you’ll have been exposed to some of the wackiest takes on the King of the Monsters imaginable. He’s been sent to hell (both Norse and Catholic), corrupted by the Venom symbiote, fought 16th-century pirates, and been the subject of a geopolitical conspiracy that triggered the respective assassinations of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Bugsy Siegel and Abraham Lincoln. Some of those things all happened in the same batshit story!

2026 alone has been sheer lunacy for the titan, as the Monsterpiece Theatre one-shots had him gatecrashing numerous works of classic literature. You might have seen him getting caught up in a tussle between the feuding clans of Montague and Capulet, for example, or disrupting Odysseus’ long voyage back to Ithaca (in a way that curiously didn’t provoke outcry from those who are all of a sudden very invested in the authorial intentions of Homer).   

For better or worse, then, these comics have become “anything goes” territory. Some of them are delightfully silly. Some of them are just plain silly. But they’re all generally silly in one way or another.

Which brings us to The Horror of Godzilla, a new four-issue miniseries that aims to strip away all that gimmickry and go right back to basics. Taking place in 1954, it transports us to a time before kaiju were an accepted part of everyday life for the citizens of Japan and attempts to capture the shock and awe people felt when they first laid eyes on an extinction-level threat towering 250 feet above them.  

As the evocative title suggests, this is being pitched as a scarier interpretation of the material that has far more in common with Ishirō Honda’s original film than it does, say, Godzilla vs Fantastic Four. Here, the titular beastie is depicted as a dreadful force of nature that tramples all over our cities with chilling indifference — its soulless white eyes betraying a complete lack of regard, empathy, or even scorn for the meagre ants scurrying around its feet. To this version of Godzilla, we’re nothing but insignificant specks whose futile efforts to avoid being squished by elemental colossi don’t register on any level.   

The story being told around this more primal, existentially terrifying depiction of the creature is similarly intense. It’s framed by a Chernobyl-esque inquiry that has government officials trying to agree on who will be the patsy they hang out to dry when the public starts looking for someone to blame after a recent catastrophe left Tokyo in ruin.

The best candidate to be this fall guy (or, more accurately, fall gal) is Dr. Olivia Morrison, a scientist who was commissioned by an unnamed think tank to discover new renewable energy sources for the benefit of humanity. Or perhaps for the benefit of corporate interests. That much is not yet clear.

When this search led Olivia to the abyssal depths of the ocean, her team’s blundering operations inadvertently roused the slumbering Godzilla and let loose a biblical disaster upon the island nation of Japan. So, she’s as good a scapegoat as any!

With the context outlined, we then flit back and forth between the courtroom drama side of things and the guilt-ridden doctor’s account of that fateful day when man first met monster. What follows is a powerful tale about the devastating impact of tragedy, about mankind’s self-destructive race towards Armageddon, and about what it means to take accountability for one’s role in shaping seismic, history-changing events. Kind of like Oppenheimer, only this time the nuclear genie that’s been let out of the bottle comes with a set of razor-sharp teeth.    

Scribes Ethan S. Parker and Griffin Sheridan deserve a good deal of the credit for how effective Horror of Godzilla’s debut chapter has turned out, as they take their uncompromising vision seriously and resist the impulse to soften any of the nastier edges. This is, after all, a story where countless innocent civilians are wiped from existence in the blink of an eye, where our protagonist’s hands are stained with the blood of thousands, and where neither pregnant women nor children are afforded plot armour. The tantalising cliffhanger it ends on is especially dark and tees up a future instalment that promises to lean further still into pure horror.  

Backing up this pitch-black tone, there’s an adult quality to the writing that’s greatly appreciated. Treating the reader with respect, the issue starts in medias res and asks you to keep up with who’s who and what their various motivations are. And it does so without ever giving way to inelegant exposition dumps.

Parker and Sheridan likewise refuse to dumb down their weightier themes and make sure there’s ample time for the more introspective moments to breathe, at least as far as they can within the confines of a 30-page comic. Not that it’s a guarantee of maturity by any means, but there are even a couple of f-bombs organically woven into the dialogue that feel natural, as opposed to edgy for edgy’s sake. 

Godzilla comics have a propensity to over-narrate and spell out what their kaiju are doing at any given moment, and, again, the writers have nicely sidestepped that clunky trope of the genre too. Instead, if there’s no reason for any of the characters to be supplying a running commentary, they simply let the pictures do the talking.

And what pictures they are! Artist Tristan Jones’ panels are all beautifully textured, and he creates some indelible, albeit frightening, images here. He truly nails Godzilla’s sense of scale, which is so often lost in print, and pays close attention to little environmental details that make his movements feel visceral and the damage left in his wake all the more tactical. Without going into spoilers, he also does a masterful job with those harrowing final pages that are bound to sear themselves into your brain.

Jones’ work is perfectly complemented by that of colorist Josh Burcham as well. In an inspired stylistic choice (and yet another connection with Oppenheimer), the latter uses his hues to delineate between the flashforward and flashback sequences of Horror of Godzilla. The parts of the comic that take place in the hearing are all vividly tinged, while the flashbacks are depicted in stark monochrome — save for the eerie green of Godzilla’s atomic breath, which here scorches the sky and casts an apocalyptic glow on proceedings.

Letterer Tom Napolitano then completes this end-of-the-world vibe with onomatopoeic sound effects that cleverly integrate with the action and form tangible shapes that give you a deeper impression of what’s happening. Raindrops land with delicate, imperceptible “plips”, while cars roar past with elongated “vrooms” and thunderous footsteps resonate with a literal “DOOM” that spans multiple panels.

All in all, the whole project is a textbook case of a creative team being utterly in sync and aligned on what they want to achieve. This is Toho’s franchise at its most visceral, nightmarish and sensory, which is an impressive feat for a piece that is in an entirely visual medium.

Godzilla’s history in print may stretch back decades, but, if this auspicious first issue is anything to go by, then we might be on the cusp of getting his best outing to date. Bring on issue #2 and the follow-up to that excruciating cliffhanger!

Published by IDW, The Horror of Godzilla #1 is available now.

The post ‘The Horror of Godzilla’ #1 Review: IDW Returns the King of the Monsters to His Terrifying Roots appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Which is why it’s so disappointing that Sager’s latest, The Unknown, doesn’t quite work for me. Like some of his best works (The Only One Left comes to mind), it’s a parallel journey of past and present, set in a compelling locale and featuring a cast of distinct characters. It’s also got a Hollywood horror hook that feels exactly like my cup of tea, but the more I read, the more frustrated I became. This is one of those thrillers that’s so laden with exposition and twists that, by the end, it’s a gnarled knot of information rather than a story, even if it does retain Sager’s inherent attention to craft and narrative propulsion. 

Marin is a struggling actress, waiting tables between auditions for commercials and obscure plays, so it’s a big surprise for her when she gets a face-to-face audition with Ronan Peters, the hottest of Hollywood’s hotshot young directors. Even more surprising, Marin gets the part! She’s going to be a major character in a new horror film by Ronan Peters, co-starring one of her idols, the legendary Violet Wright. 

Because the film is based on a real set of mysterious disappearances on an island in Vermont, Ronan aims for immersiveness and decides that his cast should spend a week on the island itself, New Avalon, where an arms manufacturer once built an estate now said to be haunted by the women who vanished there. With no electricity, no phones, and no modern clothes, Marin and her co-stars will live, rehearse, and immerse themselves in the world of New Avalon in 1926, essentially becoming the vanished women they’re set to play onscreen. 

This is perhaps my favorite setup in any of Sager’s books, a meta-story about actors living out their own American Picnic at Hanging Rock for the sake of cinematic authenticity, and of course you can see where this is going. One by one, the cast starts disappearing, a medical emergency strands the whole crew on the island, and Marin, equipped with no context but a diary written by one of the vanished 1926 women, is forced to dig deep into the island’s secrets in a search for answers.

There are seances, and storms, and dark pasts, and all the wonderful, simmering substance we’ve come to expect from Riley Sager. The first half of this book is a banger, driven by Sager’s trademark lightning pace, and even when it started to go off the rails, I found myself reading late into the night, unable to put the book down until I figured out where Sager was going. 

It’s tricky, of course, to explain why the back half of a book doesn’t work without delving into spoilers, but I’ll do my best. Because of the mystery surrounding the original 1926 disappearances, and the immersive environment Ronan hopes to create for his cast on the island, The Unknown spends much of its narrative questioning how much of what’s happening is real, and how much is part of the immersive experience. Characters bicker over whether or not a planchette is actually moving during a seance; they trade secrets about dead loved ones; they debate the merits of seeking help versus waiting things out.

At the center of it all is Marin, with a past of her own that motivates her in particular to seek out answers, and while that part works, the answers she eventually finds simply don’t. The novel, driven by Sager’s crystal-clear prose and always-dynamic pacing, builds up a very solid head of steam as Marin narrates, laying out the central questions in a setup for the third act, when Sager will unspool what’s really going on. It’s a trick he’s used many times before, and it usually works. 

So, why doesn’t it work this time? Because reading this particular book, as opposed to Sager’s other successes, I felt like the answers and the emotional impact they have on the characters were secondary to the basic need for the story to have twists that catch the reader off-guard. Riley Sager novels don’t necessarily have just one twist; they have several, nested together to create an added tension over what’s real and what’s invention. That should be extra potent in a novel about filmmakers, and yet by the end, The Unknown is much more driven by the need to swerve the readers than the need to serve the characters and their emotional journeys.

It was less exciting than it was tiring. I just wanted to see the impact of all of these secrets and decisions and hidden details, and instead the book devolves into a state of near-constant expository dialogue, laying out layer after layer of secrets. Are the questions answered? Yes. Are the answers satisfactory? Depends on your response. Do they feel like part of a story with genuine heft? By the end, they don’t. 

Again, Riley Sager’s one of our finest thriller writers, but even the best have missteps, and this was one of his for me. Maybe the old narrative tricks are wearing thin, maybe this book is over-ambitious, or maybe I just didn’t respond to it. Whatever the case, despite solid prose and pacing and a great start, this one went off the rails somewhere for me, and never got back on track. 

The Unknown is available now wherever books are sold.

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That being said, it’s only fitting to have Ryan Murphy return to high school, the very place where his television career began, for his latest ode to excess and emptiness. In fact, The Shards operates as a bizarro counterpoint to Murphy’s first series, Popular. The stark differences – and similarities – between these two programs highlight how much Murphy has and hasn’t evolved as a storyteller and filmmaker.

The Shards is certainly having a lot of fun with its detached take on 1980s Los Angeles, but it plays like a sarcastic sizzle reel of Murphy’s past triumphs. 

Murphy’s adaptations of other people’s works can be hit or miss and are never a guarantee that he’ll rein in his signature sensationalist impulses. However, Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis working together is a pairing that makes too much sense. It’s like the peanut butter and jelly of superficial societal satire. Murphy’s opulent extremism radicalizes Easton Ellis’ minimalist and detached storytelling. The Shards is an enthusiastic fetishization of not just the pop culture and fashion of the ‘80s, but also how it was a golden era for serial killers and new societal terrors. It’s the perfect marriage of Murphy’s past extremes as shallow prep school woes like parties and dances are juxtaposed against curfews, ritualistic sacrifices, and serial killer attacks. 

The series adapts Bret Easton Ellis’ autofiction of the same name, which chronicles a fictionalized version of Ellis (Igby Rigney) in 1981 Los Angeles as he juggles his prep school duties with a growing obsession over a local serial killer, The Trawler. The arrival of a mysterious new student, Robert Mallory (Homer Gere), coincides with this string of killings. A darkness descends over Los Angeles, and Bret is left to wonder if Robert Mallory and these massacres are actually connected or just a symptom of his own toxic thought process.

This all amounts to harmless entertainment if it’s not taken too seriously. It still lacks the juice of something like Euphoria or even Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin. Murphy finds himself increasingly out of touch in this world of teens. It’s enormously heightened, because of course it is, but it doesn’t feel as special in this oversaturated genre that’s naturally become so exaggerated on its own. Murphy’s trademark hyper-maximalism barely leaves an impression in a world where Riverdale and Gossip Girl are the baseline for heightened high school dramas.

Bret is at the center of a group of vapid characters who just want to survive senior year, graduate high school, and get out of Los Angeles, which makes the prospect of a serial killer a real drag. The Shards argues that kidnappings, killings, and ritualistic cults are the greatest dangers faced by children as they head into adulthood. It’s like Ryan Murphy’s own twisted version of Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide, only it’s covering serial killers, cults, and stalkers. A lot of tangential clout-chasing frivolity is covered as the hypnotic pull between Bret and Robert acts as the nucleus to it all. 

The Shards is consumed with the death of the ‘70s and how this marks the start of a ruthless and vicious new generation of disturbing detachment. It’s drenched in tropes, cliches, endless ‘80s needle drops, and hard bodies. It is exactly what you’d expect from a joint collaboration between Murphy and Easton Ellis. At the same time, it’s also not trying to be anything deeper. Its superficial slayings and takedowns of society are all exceedingly surface level, but it’s sure sleek and pretty. Murphy wants the audience to get lost in the hollow hyper-sexuality. That’s the point. It just doesn’t touch on anything that hasn’t been done many times before, and better, including in Murphy’s own productions. There’s even a hamfisted riff on Shakespeare – specifically Hamlet – that argues that ultra-trashy camp is the new classic lit and theater.

The serial killer sequences with the Trawler, while genuinely disturbing, are similarly sapped of life. You know something is amiss in a Ryan Murphy production when gratuitous murder setpieces aren’t even properly crossing lines and generating enthusiasm. In the end, it’s The Shards’ moody score by Troye Sivan and Leland, alongside unhinged performances by Evan Rachel Wood, Jordan Roth, and Wes Bentley, that stand out as highlights. Bentley in particular chews – and snorts – the scenery. 

The Shards is content to languish among its flashy hedonism, the likes of which don’t even have the decency to provide its audience with closure or answers. These episodes feel like a piece of a greater whole that will inevitably become even more pointless if The Shards gets canceled or prematurely ends. This has increasingly become Murphy’s style with his latest horror programs. It doesn’t do The Shards any favors and only highlights the season’s narrative problems and how little gets accomplished across these nine episodes. A flashy finish that’s full of answers, but also sets up new terrors, would help The Shards feel more essential and complete. As it stands, it struggles to even reach the middling heights of Grotesquerie and The Beauty, and certainly has much less to say. 

The Shards is set in an empty world where adaptations have greater value than stories. It bombards the audience with fabricated boogeymen like The Trawler and the Riders of the Afterlife cult. It’s a series that’s full of derivative imitations of better and more iconic ideas. In a way, that’s exactly what The Shards is like. It’s a slap-dash amalgamation of what’s worked for Ryan Murphy in the past, without bringing anything new to the table. 

Self-aware meta commentary on ambivalence and diminishing returns aside, this doesn’t change the fact that The Shards is still guilty of the same things that it pokes fun at. It’s a fading Xerox of a once-interesting idea that struggles to stand out. There are fleeting moments of brilliance, like in most Murphy programs, but there’s not enough to cling to here once the shock factor and eye candy wear out their welcome. 

The Shards premiere on FX and Hulu on August 5 at 6 p.m. PT.

The post ‘The Shards’ Review: A Shallow Mix Of Sex, Sensationalism & Serial Killers appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

This year’s fest delivered no shortage of surprises either, from intense new spins on vampirism with No Rest for the Wicked to inventive DIY horror comedies like The Peril at Pincer Point. It also delivered on gory sequels like The Last Temptation of Becky and the latest from Alice Maio Mackay, Our Effed Up World.

A final batch of reviews adds a horror-comedy starring a real-life sketch comedy group to the mix, along with a new take on werewolves, and a worksploitation splatstick comedy.

Big Break

Much like its title implies, horror-comedy Big Break follows a group of friends all pursuing dreams of making it big in Hollywood. Only in this instance, art comically imitates life as real-life New York comedy group Simple Town takes center stage in director Ian Faria‘s feature debut. As that implies, Big Break may drop its erstwhile Hollywood dreamers into a familiar slasher setting, but this horror-comedy only has eyes for laughs.

Big Break reunites friends and former collaborators Will (Will Niedmann), Caroline (Caro Yost), and Felipe (Felipe Di Poi Tamargo) years after their comedy troop has disbanded. They gather for a weekend visit with estranged former colleague Sam (Sam Lanier), the only one who’s achieved success post-disbandment, at his remote country cabin, hoping to work their way into his hit sequel “The Gummy Bears Movie”. Instead, old grudges are exposed and dark secrets uncovered, and the four frenemies discover how far they’re willing to go to get their big break.

Some might even be willing to kill for it.

It’s a clever setup for incisive Hollywood satire, and it’s here where Big Break is at its strongest. Big Break bides its time acclimating to this friend group, exposing their flaws and volatile relationships well before the body count begins. As such, Simple Town injects energetic improv and sketch comedy humor, lending an “anything goes” atmosphere. Moreover, their real-life history translates well on screen, making quick work of establishing character dynamics that are dialed up to satirical excess. Their larger-than-life personas make an easy foothold into this world, but they also overshadow some of Faria’s more clever musings on the industry and horror tropes.

Much of the film is dedicated to Will, Caroline, and Felipe taking turns trying to win a job on Sam’s upcoming sequel, one-upping each other or getting in each other’s way. They’re so fixated on their dreams of making it big that they don’t notice the glaring red flags signalling imminent danger. Sam isn’t exactly subtle either; Lanier leans heavily into Hollywood yuppie sleaze with sociopathic, murderous tendencies. Messy personal lives and a constant erosion of morality also get thrown into the pressure cooker scenario, and tensions rise.

Though that tension never quite translates to the audience. Big Break is a smart satire, but one far more content to use horror tropes to skewer the industry rather than embrace them. Faria never loses sight of his characters or their comedic strengths, leaving the horror part of the equation pretty underserved. It all fizzles out by the climax. There are a few good kills, but it’s all without any real stakes or suspense. The slasher is purely allegory in a comedy that’s more of a hang-out with messy friends in way over their heads. That’s not necessarily a problem with calibrated expectations, but mileage does vary on the sketch comedy chaos.

Sleep No More

Body horror takes shape as metaphor once more in Sleep No More, a gory, surreal slice of Indonesian worksploitation. Director Edwin injects a somber subject with splatstick humor, offering a raucous but occasionally sleepy shift from hell.

A bleak Jakarta wig factory serves as center stage to this horror-comedy that introduces sisters Putri (Rachel Amanda) and Ida (Lutesha), who visit the facility to investigate their mother’s abrupt death. Instead of answers, though, they’re immediately forced into labor by the ruthless owner, Mrs. Maryati (Didik Nini Thowok), who demands they pay off their mother’s debts. Not even a reunion with their younger brother (Iqbaal Ramadhan) can distract from the bleak conditions. Every employee is overworked and exhausted beyond their means, leading to an increase in unsettling accidents. It’s up to the sisters to discover whether it’s a severe case of bad management or demonic possession.

Edwin, along with co-writers Eka Kurniawan and Daishi Matsunaga, takes a grounded approach to the working conditions and labor allegory, but a delightful absurdist approach to the horror. As if to prove it, the film’s original Indonesian title, Monster Pabrik Rambut, translates to “Monster of the Hair Factory.” The film’s overarching question posed is whether that monster is ruthless boss Mrs. Maryati or whatever ancient evil seems to be maiming and slaughtering laborers. For some, the ability to regenerate allows for further abuse. 

It sounds dour, but Edwin relays workplace oppression critiques with pitch-black humor and practical effects. Sleep deprivation leads to literal extremes here, as Sleep No More dials up the gory antics for a wild finale that folds in folkloric evils to visual success. It makes for an entertaining creature feature of sorts, with inventive uses of carnage and body horror anchored by a relatable premise. But it is prone to pacing sags in its quieter depictions of overworked employees, an aspect that often clashes with the over-the-top horror elements. It doesn’t help that Sleep No More plays it almost too straightforward; there are no real surprises or horror exploration here beyond supernatural body mutations, and answers aren’t the most satisfying.

Still, there’s enough scrappy, gory splatstick charm for those who’ve ever felt exploited by terrible jobs and worse bosses…which is pretty much all of us.

When You Open the Door

Eriko Katagiri’s When You Open the Door brings Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves to mind, only in that both deliver dream-like visions of a repressed young woman who finds a means to rebel through lycanthropy. In execution, though, the films couldn’t be further apart. Katagiri takes a quieter, more methodical approach to externalizing the quiet, timid interiority of her heroine as she slowly transforms.

When You Open the Door even begins with a dream, setting the stage for the hazy voyage ahead. When we meet 27-year-old Miki (Serena Motola), she’s closed off and isolated in her own little bubble. She’s often overlooked at work, and the few interactions with co-workers expose Miki’s social awkwardness. Her husband loves her dearly, despite not seeming to really know her. Instead, Miki looks to her pet bird and various ephemera for companionship, until she’s bitten by a wolf in broad daylight.

While no one believes her – wolves went extinct in Japan long ago, after all – it marks the start of a peculiar transformation in Miki.

Katagiri, who co-writes with Shinozuka Tomoko, takes a subtle approach here. Telltale signs of werewolf infection are there, like the lengthening of nails and hair or sudden animalistic urges, but they’re handled with surrealism and restraint. The concept of a werewolf is infused with Japanese lore, giving a unique spin on the classic monster. Yet, When You Open the Door is only interested in using the werewolf as a means of exploring the isolating loneliness of the modern world. 

It instead languishes in the mundanity of Miki’s life, and her quiet surrender to it. The arrival of Itako, spiritual mediums, sheds light on Miki’s strange circumstances and livens up both the film and the protagonist, but not even the final gasp of gore can awaken this sleepy pic. Cinematographer Akiko Ashizawa captures Miki’s loose sense of reality like a cozy dream, filled with montages, motifs, and shadows that are tough to decipher. 

It’s a stunning vision of loneliness that makes smart use of the werewolf as metaphor, but it’s so internalized and introspective that it can be isolating for the viewer, too.

The post Fantasia 2026 Roundup Reviews: ‘Big Break’, ‘Sleep No More’ and ‘When You Open the Door’ appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

The rest of the film, written by Katie Boland and directed by Annie Bradley, follows adult Elizabeth (now played by Sara Paxton) on the anniversary of her mother’s death. Liz is in a stable relationship with lawyer Dan (Hamza Haq), manages her own book store/consignment shop/bar (the details are confusing), and is expecting her first child. But when she encounters an old clown at the annual fair and is subsequently accosted by Maddie (Hannah Forest Briand), a belligerent true crime podcaster, on her front lawn, Liz almost immediately miscarries.

In the aftermath of the dual traumas, Liz embarks on an investigation to uncover the details of her mother’s unsolved murder. In the process, she digs up new information that makes her question the nature of her father Reed’s (David Cubitt) relationship with stepmother Ana (Mary Krohnert), butts heads with unhelpful Sheriff Vernon (James Burke), and reaches out to her schizophrenic aunt Helen (Fiona Highet), whom she’s never met.

Killer Clown could have easily been called Who’s Gaslighting Liz? because it’s evident early on that people have been lying to Liz her whole life. She’s repeatedly made to question her own sanity, and even Dan – whose support initially seems unwavering – at one point asks her to give up her search in order to protect their relationship.

Part of his concern is that Liz has begun seeing the same clown that attacked her mother when she was five. It lures her out of her house with a bouquet of balloons that explode fake blood on her face; it stalks Liz in the parking garage of her doctor’s office; and it even attacks Aunt Helen in her house. Tellingly, though, the clown never appears when other people, especially men, are around, which makes Liz (and, by extension, the audience) question whether her mind is playing tricks on her.

It’s telling how often the men in Liz’s life question whether the trauma of the miscarriage and the anniversary are playing with her mind. At one point, Liz’s father even suggests that there’s a history of mental illness on the female side of the family. This is well worn territory for female-led thrillers and horror films, and for good reason: women continue to be disbelieved and told they’re hysterical when they try to speak out. It’s a trope of the genre not only because it makes for good conflict, but because the problem persists in real life.

One of the more enjoyable aspects of the film, though, is how often Liz pushes back against the gaslighting. When asked how she is, Liz frequently exclaims a variation of “not great!” and even when Dan, Reed, or Ana suggests she take it easy, Liz refuses to let her investigation go. As heroines go, Paxton mostly plays Liz as somewhat passive, but her doggedness is endearing, particularly in the back half of the film when it’s clear that folks aren’t being entirely truthful with her.

Of course, the other interesting element about Killer Clown is its connection to true crime. WARNING: Spoilers Ahead! The film is based loosely on reality, with ties to the murder of Marlene Warren in May 1996.

According to People.com: “Warren opened the door of her home…to what appeared to be a delivery person dressed as a clown with balloons and a basket of flowers. Moments later, the assailant shot Marlene in the mouth and calmly walked to the LeBaron parked in the driveway and drove off.

“For years, authorities suspected Sheila Keen, then 26, who was having an affair with Marlene’s husband, Michael Warren, but said they didn’t have enough evidence at the time to convict her.”

Sheila would eventually marry Michael, but 27 years later, DNA evidence implicated her in Marlene’s murder, and she was sent to jail (she has since been released).

It’s worth noting that in real life, Marlene’s son Joseph was home and witnessed his mother’s death, just like Liz does in Killer Clown. And while the killer’s identity in the film doesn’t map onto the real-life details of the case 1-for-1, the motivation and details behind the crime aren’t too far off. It’s an intriguing adaptation choice for a film that otherwise takes a lot of liberties.

Considering its title, Killer Clown isn’t as campy or salacious as Lifetime audiences may have hoped for. The reality is that the film is more rooted in Liz’s trauma and her inability to move past the thirty-year grief that has defined her life. As a drama with elevated stakes, it’s solid, and Paxton’s understated performance helps to ground the narrative with a real sense of emotion.

As for horror beats: there are a few unsettling clown-related moments, and Bradley makes good use of the fair-set scenes, including a climax that heavily features both a hedge maze and a purple-lit funhouse full of mirrors.

Killer Clown premiered on Lifetime on August 1.

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Between Children of the Corn, Village of the Damned, Them, and most recently, Weapons, there’s a great deal of variety when it comes to creepy children fare. It’s a fun, frightening premise when it’s done properly and in the right hands, which is why Eli Roth is the right fit for this sort of exploitation horror. Roth has the proper background and genre passion to make this type of adolescent evil extravaganza excel, while also breathing fresh life into it at the same time. Ice Cream Man is a killer kid horror film that helps the subgenre mature into something more layered. 

The setup is incredibly simple: a mysterious ice cream man’s signature product turns the youth of Bayleen Bay into murderous minions. However, Ice Cream Man also provides a deeper look into the perversion of safety and what happens when Capra-esque institutions of purity become the very things that taint innocence. It’s a blood-soaked epic with zero filter that still manages to reflect upon coming-of-age catharsis, the destruction of the American family, and youth’s destiny to swallow their previous generation whole. It’s also, without question, the most gruesome film of Eli Roth’s career and easily the summer’s most brutal horror movie. Forget lactose intolerant. Ice Cream Man is elegance and sophistication intolerant.

Ice Cream Man, right from the start, preaches this gloomy idea of what happens when innocence and old-fashioned values are horrifically perverted once a toxic force of nature infects everything. It begins with an Amblin outlook on life and is knee-deep in splattercore by the time the end credits roll. There’s a wry tone that’s often dropping in disdain for zoomers and today’s current youth, which helps give the ensuing chaos a little extra bite.

Regarding said chaos, it takes Ice Cream Man a little too long to get moving. The first 15 minutes are a bit of a slog and had me worried. However, once Ice Cream Man goes wild, it’s off to the races and the rest of the movie is a propulsive burst of non-stop carnage.

In many ways, Roth turns Ice Cream Man into a macabre, modern reimagining of the Pied Piper parable. There’s even an alluring sing-song quality to Ice Cream Man’s murderous manipulation that’s very Silver Shamrock-coded from Halloween III: Season of the Witch.

Ice Cream Man features a threadbare plot, but honestly, story is largely irrelevant in a film like this, and it’s really just a conduit to kickstart the kills. What follows is basically a more gratuitous grindhouse version of Weapons, only the kids are turned into murderous monsters through tainted ice cream instead of some cryptic witch magic. The ice cream truck’s innocent jingle works as the trigger that awakens these sleeper agents and sets them loose.

Amidst this mayhem, a handful of unaffected kids come together, like a middle school Breakfast Club, as they attempt to survive — and solve — these troubling events. Some of Ice Cream Man’s child actors initially leave a little to be desired. They quickly find a rhythm and fall into naturalistic performances that ring true. None of this cast may emerge as one of horror’s next rising stars, but they get the job done and keep the film moving along. Ice Cream Man taps into the same heightened, B-movie energy that’s explored in Thanksgiving, which helps make these generic performances feel a little less awkward.

Ice Cream Man’s kids become much more compelling once they’re “activated” and go mad, rather than the restrained work they’re doing earlier. Ari Millen provides a distinctly creepy performance as the titular Ice Cream Man without saying a single word. The film makes the simple but inspired decision to have its children still be capable of conversations and seemingly act normal so that they can trick their parents into a false sense of security before they strike. They’re not always in murder mode, which is a much more interesting angle than these kids just being uncontrollable “rage zombies.”

Credit where it’s due, Ice Cream Man is a triumph in terms of its gore and practical effects. Those who are just looking for explicit and exaggerated kills in the same vein as Terrifier won’t be disappointed. There’s a lot to appreciate here even if many of the more muted moments fall flat. These exaggerated executions are more than enough to make Ice Cream Man a worthy standout in Roth’s filmography and one of the summer’s more satisfying horror films.

Eli Roth has described Ice Cream Man as his most insane and goriest film to date, and the film actually follows through on this promise and manages to top the vicious heights of The Green Inferno and Hostel II. There are 100 murderous, blood-soaked kids who are on the loose here and some exceptionally gory setpieces, including kids playing jump rope and Cat’s Cradle with intestines, plus a litany of incredibly creative kills that utilize school-based items in thoroughly deranged ways. 

Ice Cream Man just moves from one darkly hilarious and vicious setpiece to the next, with each one better than the last. This also isn’t a situation where it’s just kids that attack and wreak havoc on the adults. There’s plenty of child murder going on here. Ice Cream Man doesn’t hold back when it comes to a hefty body count of young boys and girls. There’s a simple but effective backstory for the ice cream man and his corresponding chaos that turns him into a bit of a Freddy Krueger-esque totem of vengeance. To this point, Ice Cream Man builds to a surprising and ambitious final act that seems tailor-made for a sequel and extends this gruesome gonzo massacre into a full-on franchise. 

Ice Cream Man is one of the summer’s bloodiest surprises. What it lacks in story, it more than delivers in gore, and Eli Roth fans won’t be let down. It’s a love letter to the ultra-violent B-movies of the past that delivers blood, guts, and grief with a cherry on top.

Ice Cream Man is in theaters on August 7.

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Centuries from now, the world is in shambles. A plague called the Blight has wiped out much of humanity, leading nature to reclaim the world. People have largely transferred their consciousness into robots called golems, but even those are starting to decay after so long.

You play Emma, one of the remaining humans, who is notable because of her ability to absorb the Blight rather than be killed by it. While many people treat her like a pariah for being different, her ability allows her to defeat Nushi, large corrupted animals that roam the lands, to slowly take the world back from the curse of the Blight.

This is part of a larger quest to make her way to the capital and fight the titular Beast of Reincarnation, which she appears to be destined to kill.

Killing Monsters Remains Fun

There’s simultaneously a lot going on and not that much happening in the game’s narrative, at least early on. Emma meets several NPCs, some of which travel with her in her “cleanse walker” and some that she runs into while exploring. Her big hook as a character is that she doesn’t feel emotions, which is an interesting premise that’s ripe for an arc, but mostly invites repetitive conversations with her companions trying to explain to her what feelings are. Her main bond is with her large Blighted dog, Koo, who fights alongside her. There’s a lot that seems to go on around her as you’re shown conversations between other characters, but her path through the story is mostly just “look for the big monster and kill it.”

Fortunately, killing monsters, at its most basic level, is pretty fun. Heavily influenced by Sekiro, though not quite as demanding, Beast of Reincarnation features parry-heavy melee combat with an emphasis on combos and status effects. You have your standard slash attack on your right shoulder button, and a specialized attack button on a face button (square on PlayStation 5). Various combinations of these two buttons will yield different attacks, and new attacks continue to unlock throughout the game. Enemies have both a health bar and a stamina bar, and breaking their stamina through a combination of attacks and parries allows you to do an execution, which comes with a slick and violent animation.

While this is nice in theory, I had issues making the combo system really work for me. The focus on parrying means that enemies are going to be attacking a lot, so I found that I could not get in longer combos without stopping frequently to deflect incoming attacks. The audio-visual feedback on the parry is definitely satisfying, but fights with normal enemies, which are either robot golems or blight-mutated animals called Malefacts, either feel too easy or slightly punishing, depending on which type of enemy you run into. The gap between the challenge that enemy types present feels pretty wide, making for oddly balanced encounters.

You are presented with stealth options, but they feel largely underbaked. While I enjoyed dropping down on enemies from above for a quick kill, it almost struck me as funny when I ran into an enemy encounter that the game clearly wanted me to deal with via stealth, lining them up all looking away from Emma, making the sequence of kills immediately obvious in a way that took away the satisfaction of figuring it out for yourself. The perception settings also feel pretty tuned in your favor, as I occasionally stealth killed one robot without alerting the one standing meters from him in a way that broke the immersion of the fantasy the game was presenting.

I shouldn’t have been surprised by this based on the foundations of Pokémon, but there was a big focus on elemental attacks in the game, which added an interesting layer of strategy, if nothing revelatory. With various weapons and attacks, you do build up different status effects, such as burn or poison, and when they fill, the enemy will take damage over time for a specific period. New weapons you find throughout the game will be associated with different elements, allowing you to craft builds that focus on one over the other. Some enemies will have specific weaknesses that can be exploited, so paying attention to elements will help you get through some of the game’s trickier encounters.

You have a pair of ranged weapons, a crossbow and a bow and arrow, that run on limited ammunition, which I mostly used to help build up status effects. Much like the pistols in Bloodborne, they don’t do a ton of damage on their own, but they are good in a pinch when you’re trying to finish off an enemy from a distance or do some chip damage against them.

Koo is the Game’s Best Feature

Aside from the parrying, the big hook of the combat is Koo’s inclusion, which provides both mechanical and thematic texture to the fights. Not only will he fight alongside you, attacking enemies on his own, but you can also bring up an attack menu to select specific moves for him to do, each with a little QTE to complete for greater effect. This system runs on fluorescence points, which are recharged by parrying, giving you an interesting rhythm as you do big attacks, parry to recharge, then repeat the cycle.

As someone who loves turn-based RPGs, it feels like a good nod to that in the same way it did for the Final Fantasy VII remakes, if not as complex. Most of these attacks are just various amounts of damage with some elemental or healing properties mixed in, with little to differentiate them. Each of them has its own attack animation, but they rarely feel unique in the way that I had hoped for. You can’t pick the same attack twice in a row, which meant instead of using my full suite of abilities, I often just fell into a rhythm of swapping back and forth between my two go-to attacks and calling it a day. Maybe this is a problem with how I played, but I didn’t feel like the game was incentivizing me to explore in meaningful ways.

As I mentioned before, you unlock more abilities as you go, but they rarely drastically changed the way I played in a way that felt like progression. Both Emma and Koo have skill trees that can be filled out, giving you various buffs to abilities that definitely make you deadlier as you continue to do the same combat loop. I did feel that, while it was cool that you were getting more powerful by adding benefits to existing skills, the fights ended up a bit busy, with popups appearing all over to tell you about buffs that were happening. It wasn’t really affecting my moment to moment, but the JRPG levels of easy-to-confuse statuses being shown on screen were distracting instead of making me feel empowered.

Even with my quibbles, the combat mechanics are generally fun, but I wish the encounter design could rise to meet it. With very few exceptions, I didn’t feel like I was approaching different enemies using different strategies, meaning encounters just felt kinda flat. While there were two types of enemies, beasts and robots, I didn’t feel like there were enough enemy types overall to give the encounters enough variety. The heavy focus on parrying means that memorizing tells and attack patterns is key to success, and the lack of variety means you won’t be having to do it as much as you should. It feels like you have them almost all down by halfway through the game, making it feel like rote execution instead of satisfying mastery.

Boss Fights Are the Highlight

Where the combat shines the most is the boss fights with the Nushi. So much of the narrative focus is on hunting these beasts down in each zone, and they generally don’t disappoint. These are massive versions of animals, but with Annihilation-style plant growth coming out of them, warping them into something that’s equal parts beautiful and horrifying. Aside from being great presentation-wise, they also play well, providing a clever mix of melee and ranged attacks that move them all around the arena to keep you on your toes. These felt like true climactic encounters, combining spectacle and challenge in a satisfying manner.

But they aren’t without their hangups as well. While I found myself having the most fun during these fights, I definitely think they went on for too long. Generally, the pattern of the game has you running into the boss, chasing it off, then tracking it down and fighting it a final time. This final encounter almost always has a second phase, but that second phase mostly changes the creature visually without adding too much new behavior-wise.

This means that for many of the bosses, you’re fighting them three times with nearly identical encounters each time. When you’re doing two phases in a row, boss fights feel like they get near ten minutes in length, making it feel more like a test of endurance than skill. On top of the repetitive phases, occasionally you’ll fight the same boss again in a later zone, which feels pretty disappointing when you’re looking to them as the highlight of the game.

Between these boss fights, you’re generally exploring areas that are littered with various enemies, using Emma’s traversal abilities. Given that she’s absorbed so much blight, she has the power to summon vines in various ways to get around the environment. This includes a grappling hook-like skill, the ability to build temporary bridges, and a vine boost that pushes her up in the air like an advanced double jump. That final skill is the most fun, providing a neat visual twist on a classic skill that feels good to use.

Exploration Feels Too Guided

Unfortunately, I don’t find the space you’re going through all that engaging. The environments are pretty standard overgrown post-apocalyptic fare, with a mix of green natural areas and rusted old industrial spaces, and all of them run together by the end of it. On top of that, I didn’t find exploration all that rewarding. As you walk around, Koo will point out items in the environment, which in some ways deflates the joy of finding them. Occasionally, one will be marked by him, and it will be a little bit of a puzzle to figure out how to get to it, but most of the time it’s pretty easy to track down items when they are on your HUD. I like the fictional nature of him helping you out, but it felt kinda deflating to just be shown where the secrets were.

The levels act as small open worlds, with each zone being small in size and fairly linear. There’s room to explore, but the game has so many methods in place to keep you on the golden path. There’s a big blue line that appears in the air, a representation of Koo’s sense of smell, that will always guide you in the correct direction, as well as little glowing butterflies that highlight specific places you need to go. At some points, there are even big graffiti arrows on the walls and ground that make sure you know that this is the way. While it’s nice that I never really felt lost while playing, that came at the cost of the magic of exploration, which is something I value in games.

Your cleanse walker acts as a mobile base of operations that moves you between these zones, and you’ll need to go back there every once in a while. When I started playing the game, it was not clear to me why I needed to go back, but then I looked at the game’s tutorials and realized there was a whole hunger system that I wasn’t really engaging with, where staying away from your home base can have adverse effects (though it appears those were minor enough as to go unnoticed). At the cleanse walker, you can interact with your crew, who have both narrative and mechanical purposes on board.

Kagura, a girl you saved at the start of your journey, cooks you meals with ingredients that you collect and grow, while also trying to bond with you emotionally. Brad, the grizzled pilot, acts as a merchant while also guiding you through your quest to kill the Nushi. You also have Violet, who doesn’t have a mechanical purpose, but is a weird ghost that only you can see, driving much of the game’s mystery.

Both Koo and Kagura have an affinity meter that allows you to bond with them through interacting, but it felt rudimentary at best. Because it’s always fun to have a dog in a game, it works best with Koo, who you can pet and clean to raise your relationship with, but it was never really clear to me what the benefits were. Even weirder, I hit the maximum bond level with Koo after about 10 hours into the 25-hour campaign, which felt strangely early. While I enjoyed having a place where narrative could be delivered, I didn’t really get a lot out of the systems aboard the cleanse walker, mainly because it seemed unclear what it was doing outside of some minor stat boosts from the meals I was getting.

Pacing and Storytelling Hiccups

Narratively, the pacing of the game feels a bit off as well. After the flashback-heavy opening, the story dies down for quite some time, focused heavily on the act of moving from one zone to another to hunt down Nushi, which don’t really have much story significance aside from acting as boss fights. The recurring NPCs that you come across are largely mysterious and unexplained until the game decides to dump all the narrative on you in the final act. The story feels so backloaded with its exposition, making the beginning feel a bit aimless, and the final stretch feel overwhelming, rather than being satisfying throughout.

The delivery of the narrative was also a bit lacking for me. Aside from the exciting cutscenes that punctuate most of the boss fights, a lot of the narrative sequences feel stiff, with the characters standing fairly motionless as they talk. A decent portion of the story is delivered in conversations where other characters talk to each other without Emma being there, making it feel like the story is happening around her rather than to her. After boss fights, there are strings of cutscenes that just keep coming, and it felt like it was at least ten minutes or so before you were able to get back to the action. For me to sit through cutscenes that long, I need them to be a lot more dynamic than what Beast of Reincarnation was giving me.

Even when all was revealed by the end, I didn’t really feel like there was that much new that the game was bringing to the table with its story and world. It felt too reminiscent of Nier: Automata, with a hint of Death Stranding in there for good measure, but without the oddball charm that those titles have. Perhaps that’s the challenge of having a protagonist that canonically is emotionless, but I just felt like I wanted a little more personality aside from the novelty of having a big, cute dog.

Also hurting my enjoyment was a weird lack of polish overall that, while never gamebreaking, irked me in little ways. The camera would twitch when hitting a wall, sound effects felt out of sync with animations, and bad collision caused me to climb up the environment weirdly or get caught in corners. Attack animations generally looked sharp in play, but occasionally I would catch people clipping through the environment during cutscenes. These are all types of things that could be fixed in a post-launch patch, but given the high fidelity of the visuals, little issues like this felt distracting.

One of the biggest things that bothered me was the language option menu. By default, the game starts with Japanese voice acting with English subtitles, which are pretty small and don’t have a backing on them. Because there was frequent dialogue during the action, I was having trouble keeping up with the subtitles in the middle of fights, so I paused the game and went into the language options to see what I could do. The menu had no way to change the spoken language, and there were no options to adjust the subtitles for visibility. I powered through, dealing with the subtitles the whole game, and when I hit the credits, I saw an English voice cast listed.

Turns out that you could switch the voice acting to English, but it was only available at the main menu version of the settings, not in the pause menu settings. Even if there may be some technical reason preventing them from changing the voice settings while the game is running, they probably at least should have had a little note in the pause menu saying it could be changed from the main menu. While this may be slightly my fault for not checking all menus thoroughly, it speaks to some of the design decisions of the game that didn’t feel fully formed or well thought out.

Final Verdict

It’s hard to review a game like this because there’s something here; I’m just not sure if it’s the game itself or the games it’s reminding me of. Shades of Sekiro and Nier: Automata need to be a starting point rather than the most notable feature, and Beast of Reincarnation never really got out of the shadow of either. The dog companion is a solid hook for the game, but it doesn’t bring enough personality to either the narrative or the combat to make it truly shine.

It’s clear that this is the biggest project that Game Freak has worked on, because a lack of polish both in concepts and execution keeps this from being as memorable as it should. If you love third-person action games, you could do a lot worse than the combat mechanics presented here.

The issue is that it’s very easy for you to do a lot better, as well.

Code provided by publisher. Beast of Reincarnation is available for PC via Steam, PlayStation 5, and the Xbox Series.

The post ‘Beast of Reincarnation’ Review: A Soulslike That Never Escapes Its Influences appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

But there’s more at work here than simply trying to ape Corman’s from-the-hip style. It’s more of an ethos than a visual or narrative blueprint, the sense that you can always make something special with very little, if you’ve got the determination and the creativity, and Pincer Point has that in spades. Though Corman is its spiritual father, this is a film that puts its own singular stamp on the landscape of independent genre filmmaking now, a beautiful, dreamy, earnest blend of horror, comedy, and good old-fashioned British weird that’s one of the best things I’ve seen all year. 

Jim (Jack Redmayne) is a sound recordist working in the early 2000s British cinema scene whose work has seen better days. He’s coasting on past successes, cutting corners with his work, and his bosses have started to notice. Fortunately for Jim, he catches a break when a tyrannical director decides he needs an intrepid recordist to head back out to a location to capture a specific woman’s voice. The location? Pincer Point, a secluded island where technology hasn’t advanced past payphone boxes, the locals have their own way of doing things, and the woman Jim’s looking for is…well, hard to find. 

Fearful that he’ll lose his entire career if he admits defeat and simply goes home without finding his subject, Jim sticks around, recording old fishermen’s tales of a legendary ghostly ship that marks its victims through crab bites and then transforms them into ageless crustaceans. The more he explores the island, though, the more Jim starts to wonder if the old stories have a ring of truth, particularly when he hears what sounds like the voices of old sailors on the wind, warning him to turn back. 

Much of the Corman influence in the film lies in its independent spirit and ingenuity, but there are also, of course, visual similarities as well, particularly in Corman’s early black-and-white efforts like Attack of the Crab Monsters and, of course, the offbeat humor of The Little Shop of Horrors. But while the influences might begin there, it’s certainly not where they end. The grainy, black-and-white, Academy ratio visuals conjured by Stratton-Twine, Kuhn, and cinematographer Murray Zev Cohen evoke everything from the dreamscapes of Powell and Pressburger to the haunting shades of Carl Theodor Dreyer to more recent successes like Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse.

Armed with miniatures, CGI, and seaside compositions that look like living paintings, the filmmakers deliver everything from an island where every rock seems shaped like a crustacean’s claw to a glowing, mysterious woman who washes up in the surf. It’s like stepping into another world adjacent to our own. 

And that otherworldly sensibility is helped along by a glorious sound design job masterminded by Joseph Eccles and Nick Smyth. Sound is crucial to the film, of course, since it’s the story of a recordist and sound designer, and it matters not just in an aural sense but in a thematic one. What begins as a desperate attempt to keep his job and get his career back on track soon becomes a journey of obsession for Jim.

Phantom sounds harry him, some of them funny and others quite creepy, until he gets lost in the recurring patterns of them, the sense that themes are building, that he’s trapped in a musical composition in which he is but one voice. The film further emphasizes the importance of sound by rarely moving the camera, focusing instead on the ways in which movement in the frame (something that’s both an old-school Western cinema tradition and one turned into high art by Japanese directors like Ozu and Kurosawa) and the wash of sound over an image can generate emotion. 

It falls to Redmayne to carry much of that emotion, and he gives a performance that feels both intensely natural and just absurd enough to fit into this otherworldly seascape. There’s an improvisational feel – and indeed, the credits nod to the cast for improvising beyond the script – to the dialogue in The Peril at Pincer Point, another nod to Corman and his need to just get on with takes and keep shooting, that reflects the independent spirit of the movie, but also gives us insight into the way the characters work.

Jim, for all of his experience and the industry clout he uses as a crutch, has no idea what he’s doing. He’s wandered, in every way that matters, off the creative map and into uncharted territory. He’s fumbling in the dark for something with a meaningful shape, and the dialogue and performances capture that feeling. I wouldn’t call this movie particularly frightening in a visceral way, but it is wonderfully unsettling, and a big part of that comes from the way Redmayne’s able to play Jim as a guy whose true purpose is slowly dawning on him. 

The Peril at Pincer Point begins by styling itself as a meta-monster movie, and while it keeps that tone throughout, its greater achievement, beyond the visual dazzle and the evocative soundscape, is in the way it depicts creativity as an act of intense, obsessive faith. Like Corman, these filmmakers had to believe in what they were doing long enough to see it through, scraping and clawing (crab pun absolutely intended) their way to something with real meaning. The horror elements of the film suggest that sometimes this meaning we find is more than we can handle, but the overall vision is one which tells us that the search, however arduous, is always worth it.

Every once in a while you need a movie that gets you excited not just about movies, but about the pure organic joy of creativity all over again. The Peril at Pincer Point is one of those movies, an indie gem with a handmade heart, a folk-horror mind, and a Cormanesque soul. 

The Peril of Pincher Point screened at the 2026 Fantasia International Film Festival. Release info TBD.

The post ‘The Peril at Pincer Point’ Review: Gorgeous, Handmade Horror-Comedy [Fantasia 2026] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.