What a dazzling corker of an opening! The camera cranes down to the marquee of a health facility and suddenly lightning strikes on the sign. Henceforth the club is “Death Spa” and cinematographer Arledge Armenaki lurks around the corridors with a voyeuristic point-of-view. In a steam room, a curvaceous dancer sensually caresses her body until the temperature increases and she is practically simmering inside.
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‘The Hunt’ is Blumhouse’s archly hipster, redundant rendition of ‘The Most Dangerous Game’ with liberal dosages of presumptuous gallows humor which never materialize into talking-head laughs (the anti-elite lines are mortifying edentate- “We’re gonna be on Hannity…Just like those two Jew boys that fucked Nixon up.”).
‘The Wolf of Snow Hollow’ is an enjoyably blithe horror-comedy hybrid for Jim Cummings’ trifecta of headliner, writer and director and beyond that, it is a bittersweet epitaph for Robert Forster whose gravitas stratify this lycanthrope tale to snowbound film noir on the wavelength of Coen Brothers (“You feel like you’re having a heart attack? Right now?” “Nah, since August.”).
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‘Antebellum’ is a punishingly self-congratulatory, crystalline thriller with an egregious exploitation of the nation’s dehumanization of Nubian citizens to the point of non-minority prejudice (Jena Malone is defiantly overacting as Elizabeth, a Caucasian succubus who obviates eye contact with “inferior” ethnicities).
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‘Possessor Uncut’ is a clinical, nonplussed grotesquery about the fungible nature of identity in an Orwellian surveillance society and Canadian auteur Brandon Cronenberg more than adjudicates how plainly rancorous monolithic corporations are and will be in the adjacent future.
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‘You Should Have Left’ is a byzantine, paranormal thriller which is also a scalpel-sharp Tinseltown satire (e.g. The rhetoric of a “closed set” is verboten to non- industry outsiders like Susanna’s (Amanda Seyfried) scandal-embroiled husband Theo Conroy (Kevin Bacon) but not the latte delivery boy).
‘Hubie Halloween’ is Adam Sandler’s bovine, stratospherically unfunny vendetta against the Academy Awards committee who omitted his nomination for his tour-de-force performance in last year’s ‘Uncut Gems’.
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Slide-show photography of Montreal’s Starliner Towers is immediately unnerving despite being pictures of the swanky tennis court and delicatessen. It could be the wryly monotone instructional video announcer and how it culminates with the medical examiner on the premises. David Cronenberg germinates the groundwork for the epidemic thunderclap ahead with those images and how the doorman’s gun is “just an advertising gimmick.”
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‘Train to Busan: Peninsula’ is a faineant sequel to the exquisitely overrated South Korean zombie flick from 2016 and it doesn’t filibuster about pandemic theories (a pundit television appearance is the viewers’ only hypothesis and the acting is quite amateurish) when a breakneck pace is stipulated.
Let’s all marvel at the fact that this blaxploitation horror flick is rated PG which was much more lenient during this era. While the boom mics are either hovering in the frame or muzzled with echoes around Count Dracula’s (Charles Macaulay) opulent manor in Transylvania, the frugal sound design is the only AIP aspect of this surprisingly baroque, sophisticated production.
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