Multiplex Madness
Dracula
⭐️
🏆"Hurst So Good" Must-See Bad Movie Award🏆
Genre: Horror
Director: Luc Besson
Starring: Caleb Landry Jones, Christoph Waltz, Zoë Bleu, Matilda De Angelis, Ewens Abid, David Shields, Guillaume de Tonquédec
When I talked about Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein movie last year, I lamented that there wasn't a Dracula movie on the horizon. Little did I know that Luc Besson had already made one and it had already seen release in France, so I stand corrected. Now having seen it, I'm probably still likely I'm going to pair Del Toro's Frankenstein with Robert Eggers' Nosferatu primarily because they're of similar artistic passion. Also, Besson's Dracula is hilariously bad.
This version of Dracula leans into that thing a lot of Dracula adaptations do (most notably the Francis Ford Coppola version) that has Mina Harker as the reincarnation of Dracula's past wife, something that was not a thing in the original book. But most of the key elements are here. Jonathan Harker meets Dracula, Dracula keeps him prisoner, Dracula travels to Jonathan's homeland (which is France in this version) and preys upon Mina. It's an altered variation on the book, which seems to be because Besson's vision is trying to be poetic and operatic. It's impressive how much he fails at it, turning Bram Stoker's gothic entertainer into artless smut. A sizable percentage of this movie is senseless trash, while a good portion is also endearing kitsch that one wishes the movie exploited more. There are a lot of scenes in this movie that are inexplicably weird, including impromptu dance numbers and little gargoyle minions, just like Quasimodo in Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame. And they act like Munchies.
The only component the movie utilizes to it full potential is the typically outstanding Christoph Waltz, who starred in both a Dracula and Frankenstein movie within months of each other, which makes him this generation's Edward Van Sloan and/or Peter Cushing, if you think about it. He plays the movie's Abraham Van Helsing, though he is not mentioned by name, opting to be a mysterious priest who is searching for vampires. He's not the only one who is trying to save this movie, either. The roles of Renfield and Lucy have been combined and replaced by a new character named Maria, played by Matilda de Angelis, who is the one person in this movie having the most fun. If more people in this movie followed her lead with the campy sex appeal, this movie could probably be glorious. Sadly, it's stuck behind Caleb Landry Jones as Dracula. Jones is not a poor casting choice, he's just a boring one. He brings no, pardon the pun, blood to the role. He fills a lot of requirements for a good Dracula, he just plays him without personality. Without a solid lead and severe inconsistency in its camp value, Besson's Dracula is a spectacular misfire from top-to-bottom. I don't know if it's the worst Dracula movie because I'm not nearly as obsessed with seeking them out like I am with Frankenstein, but of the ones I have seen, it's bottom tier. But I hear Dario Argento's was worse. Maybe I should watch that and give this movie a challenger for the title.
The Moment
⭐️⭐️1/2
Genre: Drama
Director: Aiden Zamiri
Starring: Charli XCX, Alexander Skarsgård, Rosanna Arquette, Kate Berlant, Jamie Demetriou, Hailey Benton Gates, Isaac Powell
Pop star Charli XCX stars in this fictionalized drama version of the tail end of "Brat Summer," which people much younger than I am know more about. All I know is that it happened in 2024 and "brat" was one of those stigma words that was reclaimed and turned into a positive, like us Millenials saying the word "bad" to mean good when we were tweens. The Moment isn't always firing on all cylanders as a drama. Charli XCX's idea for this movie seems to be of the psychological pressures of being a pop artist, which is fair enough. An actual documentary might have been better for what she wants to get across instead of her scripted situations, which often feel like planned stunts. To be fair, Charli XCX is a pretty compelling lead and her creative frustrations of everything coming together, falling apart, then being reassembled actually lead to an interesting psychoanalysis of the collaborative creative process. Some aspects of this feel one-dimensional, especially Alexander Skarsgård's director character, who is a one-note douchebag throughout all of his scenes. I think if Charli XCX managed to flesh out more of this movie, it could be an artistic triumph. As is, it's an "Almost had it."
Solo Mio
Kevin James gets jilted at the alter. Why? The movie doesn't seem to care. It's just a thing that needs to happen so he can be alone and sad in Italy. He wanders around until he meets a cafe owner that he begins to have a new romantic spark with, and thus romcom blossoms, despite not being very funny nor romantic. I guess this movie is harmless enough and not unpleasant to watch. It's just so empty, meandering, and meaningless. Instead of telling a story, James just wallows in depression about a woman who won't marry him until he stumbles upon a woman who will. The movie might as well be a bad reality show competition to see who gets to be his replacement wife. Maybe the movie would be fine if there were any substance to the blooming romantic couple, but their relationship is too plastic to be charming. It only exists because a broken heart isn't allowed to exist and in RomComLand it demands to be mended instantly. It's just a hollow approximation of an emotional bond, and if the emotional bond in one of these movies falls flat, then it has nothing to offer.
The Strangers: Chapter 3
In a weird way, this is probably one of my most anticipated movies of the year. I have become utterly fascinated with the existence of this new Strangers trilogy. The entire idea is so perplexing to me. A recognizable and mostly respected horror brand falls into your lap and this is what you chose to do with it? Craft a three-part story that put on full display just how much you misunderstood the first movie? I had to bring closure to this, because I just need to see the whole mess, at this point.
Whistle
Death comes too soon in this soon-on-Shudder horror flick where a group of teens discover a "death whistle," which summons a ghostly entity and kills the summoner by bringing the moment of their death to the present. It's a little like Final Destination, except with a physical conduit to revolve around. Whistle exists squarely in the realm of horror that has a concept and grisly death scenes and serves up little outside of that. As popcorn horror goes, it's pretty entertaining and a little gross, which makes it efficient despite its lack of ambition. The movie's major selling point has the characters being chased around by entities that take the form of themselves in what form they would take on the day they die, so if you die of old age, a creepy old person chases you, or if you die in a fire, it's a charred corpse. There's an allure to that creativity because quite a few of them line up with the context clues given, while one in particular is weirdly specific to act just as an excuse to get someone to randomly combust into a shower of blood. As horror movie junk food, Whistle can be silly and fun, while it also plays with that moral you'd assume Final Destination would have if their characters weren't all paranoid: you never know what day death comes, so live in today. And it also utters an exchange that should be an unofficial slogan of the horror genre:
The Voice of Hind Rajab
Solo Mio
⭐️⭐️
Genre: Comedy, Romance
Director: Chuck Kinnane, Dan Kinnane
Starring: Kevin James, Kim Coates, Nicole Grimaudo, Alyson Hannigan, Jonathan Roumie
Kevin James gets jilted at the alter. Why? The movie doesn't seem to care. It's just a thing that needs to happen so he can be alone and sad in Italy. He wanders around until he meets a cafe owner that he begins to have a new romantic spark with, and thus romcom blossoms, despite not being very funny nor romantic. I guess this movie is harmless enough and not unpleasant to watch. It's just so empty, meandering, and meaningless. Instead of telling a story, James just wallows in depression about a woman who won't marry him until he stumbles upon a woman who will. The movie might as well be a bad reality show competition to see who gets to be his replacement wife. Maybe the movie would be fine if there were any substance to the blooming romantic couple, but their relationship is too plastic to be charming. It only exists because a broken heart isn't allowed to exist and in RomComLand it demands to be mended instantly. It's just a hollow approximation of an emotional bond, and if the emotional bond in one of these movies falls flat, then it has nothing to offer.
In the end, if you want a romcom in Italy, there is no shortage of them. My personal favorite is Roman Holiday, and this one likely won't be the favorite of many.
The Strangers: Chapter 3
⭐️1/2
Genre: Horror
Director: Renny Harlin
Starring: Madelaine Petsch, Gabriel Basso, Ema Horvath, Richard Brake, Rachel Shenton, Ella Bruccoleri
In a weird way, this is probably one of my most anticipated movies of the year. I have become utterly fascinated with the existence of this new Strangers trilogy. The entire idea is so perplexing to me. A recognizable and mostly respected horror brand falls into your lap and this is what you chose to do with it? Craft a three-part story that put on full display just how much you misunderstood the first movie? I had to bring closure to this, because I just need to see the whole mess, at this point.
Maybe they were counting on people like me to bring in the box office to these movies.
I even went as far to re-watch the last two films in preparation for this. I didn't really get anything new out of them, though it's weird how noticeably "better" (in a relative term) Chapter 1 is over 2, even though it's just "The Strangers but worse." What did strike me on re-watch is that Chapter 1 has sturdier plotting, which I realized is because it's using the skeleton of the original movie, so that one thing it does right is not something it can credit to itself. They finally do their own original take on this story in Chapter 2 and it's just not anything. It seems to want to be a paranoia thriller but is so distracted by maintaining slasher movie tropes that it never actually soaks in the paranoia.
And now the climax is here. This movie is guaranteed to suck. The question is, was there any point to this entire project? For what it's worth, it's the best of the three films. Unlike the first, it feels like it has an idea. Unlike the second, it has a semblance of cohesion. But it also was set up for failure no matter what movie they made with this one. The best thing about it is that its honors the previous movies by being terrible.
We last left our exhausted final girl Madelaine Petsch having successfully killed Pin-Up Girl. Remaining killers Scarecrow and Dollface then take Petsch captive and try to train her to be the new Pin-Up Girl, which is an idea that I'm sure makes sense to them but is in reality really stupid. The idea of "you killed and now you're a killer" has been done in horror movies before, and much better than it has been done here. Hell, in this movie it makes even less sense. They just grab her and put the Pin-Up mask on her, like it's supposed to be Tim Allen's The Santa Clause and she's just supposed to magically turn into a saucy serial killer.
I mean, this kinda happened with Amanda in the original Saw trilogy. She actually had an arc, though. This is "You stab someone, you do stab things now."
Probably the most appealing thing about this trilogy is how it seems to have been written with the promise of finally giving a backstory to the serial killers who had no explanation. The lack of an explanation was kind of their entire point in the first place but we're on the fifth film now, so new info would be kinda nice. We were teased with Pin-Up flashbacks in the last one, which were odd and simplistic. This new movie doubles down on it, telling an oddball love story between her and Scarecrow. And eventually Dollface too, who, spoiler alert, is just some random chick they picked up. I guess this is as good a backstory as any for them, but the Strangers don't have the personality to carry a Bonnie & Clyde story. Child's Play characters Chucky and Tiffany, for example, are the right types of personalities for a movie like that. The Strangers are too static for something like this. It's like having Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees do Shakespeare. If you were to ask me what I would have done, I think these sequels would have been better off trying to have Petsch's character try and figure out who the killers are and see that the trail led to mundane people who had normal lives. That would have been an approach, exploring the abnormal beneath "normalcy."
But no. The Strangers are just freaks. And they're obviously freaks, too. This trilogy feels like it has been trying to subvert the expectations of what we assumed was underneath the original Strangers movie, but all it did was turn it into every other type of slasher movie. The second movie reveals who Pin-Up Girl is in the first scene, which was the most surprising of any of the killer reveals and they just flat out threw it down like it was notgung. Then they flaunt the guy who is obviously Scarecrow throughout the rest of the movie, then act like they're being coy about it, only for the third movie to go "Yeah, it's him. We tricked you, didn't we?" Then they just rush out a Dollface origin because it feels like they forgot about her. All of this and a "town lore" too, because it's not enough that the Strangers are just bad people, there has to be a conspiracy around them, too.
If you watched the original Strangers film in 2008 and thought all this shit was going down beneath it, you have a more active imagination than I do.
But at least this movie is something. The last two movies weren't anything. So, extra credit for that. Did I waste my time? Yes. Was it mine to waste? Also, yes. I needed to see what this was because from minute one I couldn't figure out what they were doing. Now I know what they were doing and I'm more confused than ever, which means I'm somehow even more obsessed with these three stupid movies. When something grabs my curiosity, I can't shake that. Congratulations to this awful trilogy. You stole my attention, which is the most valuable thing I have.
Whistle
⭐️⭐️1/2
Genre: Horror
Director: Corin Hardy
Starring: Dafne Keen, Sophir Nélisse, Sky Yang, Jhaleil Swaby, Ali Skovbye, Nick Frost, Percy Hynes White, Michelle Fairley
Death comes too soon in this soon-on-Shudder horror flick where a group of teens discover a "death whistle," which summons a ghostly entity and kills the summoner by bringing the moment of their death to the present. It's a little like Final Destination, except with a physical conduit to revolve around. Whistle exists squarely in the realm of horror that has a concept and grisly death scenes and serves up little outside of that. As popcorn horror goes, it's pretty entertaining and a little gross, which makes it efficient despite its lack of ambition. The movie's major selling point has the characters being chased around by entities that take the form of themselves in what form they would take on the day they die, so if you die of old age, a creepy old person chases you, or if you die in a fire, it's a charred corpse. There's an allure to that creativity because quite a few of them line up with the context clues given, while one in particular is weirdly specific to act just as an excuse to get someone to randomly combust into a shower of blood. As horror movie junk food, Whistle can be silly and fun, while it also plays with that moral you'd assume Final Destination would have if their characters weren't all paranoid: you never know what day death comes, so live in today. And it also utters an exchange that should be an unofficial slogan of the horror genre:
"What if I don't wanna die?"
"Then you shouldn't have been born."
Art Attack
The Voice of Hind Rajab
⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Oscars Nominated: Best International Feature Film
Genre: Drama, Thriller
Director: Kaouther Ben Hania
Starring: Saja Kilani, Motaz Malhees, Amer Hlehel, Clara Khoury
Here to absolutely wreck us is the Tunisian International Oscar Nominee, which uses the real life audio of a six-year-old girl named Hind Rajab who was trapped in Gaza as Israeli forces killed her family in an attack, leaving her trapped in a car trying to phone for help. The film dramatizes the Palestinian call center who are trying to send a team to rescue her, facing bureaucratic red tape and logistical hurdles of sending an ambulance into a war zone, where they could theoretically have her out in less than ten minutes, delaying the operation for hours. This is a difficult film to talk about because it's uniquely frustrating and upsetting, making it worse is the fact that we're reminded every minute that this actually happened because of the actual audio. What did strike me about this film is that if this were a film made in the USA, it would be a film about the perseverance of rescue teams who put their lives on the line and get results, all for a moment of feel-good hero worship at the end after saving the day. That's not what this is. What this movie does is fiercely show the reasons why such efforts feel futile in the moment, knowing that if the plan is executed poorly, more than a little girl might be lost.
If one is sensitive to child endangerment, I highly recommend looking up the story of Hind Rajab before going into this movie because the way things turn out might be difficult for some. I'm not sure if that's a spoiler or not, but this story is public record and so are the audio recordings, which were released on social media to help push people into action. Part of me thinks the use of the actual audio is a little ghoulish, but it also hammers in the heartache that the film is trying to provide. It succeeds. That's one thing I can say for certain.
Oscar Nominations
The Alabama Solution (N/A)
All the Empty Rooms (N/A)
Arco (N/A)
Armed Only with a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud (N/A)
Avatar: Fire and Ash ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Blue Moon ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Bugonia ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Butcher's Stain (N/A)
Cardboard (N/A)
Children No More: "We and Are Gone" (N/A)
Come See Me in the Good Light (N/A)
Cutting Through Rocks (N/A)
The Devil Is Busy (N/A)
Diane Warren: Relentless (N/A)
Elio ⭐️⭐️1/2
F1 ⭐️⭐️
Forevergreen (N/A)
Frankenstein ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
A Friend of Dorothy (N/A)
The Girl Who Cried Pearls (N/A)
Hamnet ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
If I Had Legs I'd Kick You ⭐️⭐️⭐️
It Was Just an Accident ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Jane Austen's Period Drama (N/A)
Jurassic World: Rebirth ⭐️1/2
Kokuho (N/A)
KPop Demon Hunters ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Little Amélie or the Character of Rain ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
The Lost Bus ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Marty Supreme ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Mr. Nobody Against Putin (N/A)
One Battle After Another ⭐️⭐️1/2
The Perfect Neighbor ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Perfectly a Strangeness (N/A)
Retirement Plan (N/A)
The Secret Agent (N/A)
Sentimental Value ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Singers (N/A)
Sinners ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Sirāt (N/A)
The Smashing Machine ⭐️⭐️1/2
Song Sung Blue ⭐️⭐️1/2
The Three Sisters (N/A)
Train Dreams ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Two People Exchanging Saliva (N/A)
The Ugly Stepsister ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
The Voice of Hind Rajab ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Weapons ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Zootopia 2 ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Movies Still Playing At My Theater
28 Years Later...: The Bone Temple ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Avatar: Fire and Ash ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Clika ⭐️
The Housemaid ⭐️⭐️1/2
Iron Lung ⭐️⭐️
Marty Supreme ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Mercy ⭐️1/2
Send Help ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Shelter ⭐️⭐️1/2
Zootopia 2 ⭐️⭐️⭐️
New To Digital
The Dutchman ⭐️1/2
Hamnet ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
The Housemaid ⭐️⭐️1/2
The Plague ⭐️⭐️⭐️
We Bury the Dead ⭐️⭐️⭐️
New To Physical
Keeper ⭐️⭐️
Coming Soon!
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