"Immaculate" - Review

Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney) is a devout young woman who found faith when she fell into a frozen lake as a child and clinically died for 7 minutes. When her church closes, she is headhunted for a monastary in Italy, and decides to take the vows. But at this picturesque home for aging nuns in their final years, she finds something awry...

I'm so glad that the "Nunsploitation" genre is back.
It uses the baroque, lovely scenery and buildings well, and has grand guignol sweeping shots and zooms, and even a fair few Giallo-esque dream sequences and costumes to boot on top of its religious trappings. It's well shot, and a bit of a throwback to old school 70s nun movies and creepy Italian stuff. Sweeney is great in it, and there is some amazing gore to boot.
But that ending? Holy shit, what an ending. The final act is where it comes together (refreshingly!) and its final shots are haunting, intense shit.
I recommend.

"Late Night with the Devil"

Welcome to a very special edition of "Night Owls"! Join our wonderful host Jack Delroy, in this spooktacular Halloween special, as he interviews a very special group of guests!
We have the Amazing Christou, a psychic medium here to promote his latest tour! We have Carmichael Haig, famous great magician turned skeptic and debunker of the claims of the paranormal!
We have Dr June Ross-Mitchell, here to promote her latest book about a Satanic cult, alongside its subject, the amazing Lilly! You'll have all of your favourite banter, musical interludes and charming repartee between Jack, his sidekick Gus, and all of their guests, so tune in! Tonight's show promises to be a magical event!

First, it's wonderful to have the perpetually hangdog, underrated David Dastmalchian in a leading role, particularly something he seems born to play. He's great. Ian Bliss as the haughty, theatrical, dickish skeptic Carmichael the Conjurer is also fantastic and threatens to steal the show. The film has fun with its 70s setting, and cutting to "Commercial Breaks", and it all gets a few laughs. The scares are competently done and there are some wonderful, fittingly 70s looking gore and puppetry effects in the 3rd act. It stumbles a bit through the 3rd act but sticks the landing, and its made fairly well enough that the usual checklist of things don't really bother me, but that's just personal: I've seen way too many possession movies and Satanism films.
Plus Michael Ironside is apparently the narrator here!
However, all of this praise must be cast aside, and I do not do this lightly, because the filmmakers used plagiarism software ("AI" to common parlance) to create its title cards. Such things are, and I cannot stress this enough, unacfuckingceptable in any way, shape or form: non consensually stealing the art of others to churn out product, damning and ignoring and surpassing the very creatives you claim to be, that shit cannot be allowed to stand. Fuck these guys.
It's a shame really.

"Imaginary" - Review

Children's picture book artist Jessica (DeWanda Wise) must navigate the trials and tribulations of moving back into her childhood home and caring for her 2 stepdaughters, complicated by the realisation that she is trapped in a Jeff Wadlow movie.

Another banger from the master of incompetence, Jeff Wadlow!
In an era of skin deep corporate, name recognition swill and "brand recognition" designed for algorithms and metric data making for shitty movies; it's refreshing to have a movie fumbled by an incompetent dullard rooted in the horror movie wastelands of the 2000s. I've missed you, Jeff Wadlow!
If you don't know who this cinematic visionary is, allow me to regale you: Wadlow is behind "Truth or Dare" (reminding people that Blumhouse started out with crap which made money... AFTER they had started seeing success and winning Oscars); "Kick Ass 2" (the sequel so bad it stopped them making a 3rd before Mark Millar's writing could: so, you know, the best one!), "Never Back Down" (the martial arts movie shot like fucking "Dragonball"), "Fantasy Island" (his... "best" one?) and "Cry Wolf" (fuck my life, I hate that movie... Okay, that's the worst one. Being the worst Jeff Wadlow movie is like being the most generic English singer-songwriter, like, they're all pretty bad, but one of them is Jake Bugg.). Wadlow's a man who knows no fear, knows not cringe, despises tonal consistency, and is almost always on the verge of knowing what he is doing.
This is firmly a Wadlow masterpiece.
All hail Jeff Wadlow, for bringing out things in bad horror films as a checklist, and showing us the way to badness: just have a vision which fails!
He is like a facsimile of other, good horror movies: objects will move when characters are not looking, a looming, shadowy figure will be genuinely creepy in the background (the first time...), and the ending features an "Insidious"-esque crossover with M.C Escher.
But the first 10 seconds (new record, Jeff, touche!) are a brightly lit, statically shot spider man in a suit chasing the lead through a dream sequence, marking this firmly as a Wadlow-cinematic universe movie. He has an earnestness on display, but the scripting, pacing, scares, atmosphere and even in some cases acting are just bad.
It's honestly kind of enjoyable like that.
The film plays out like a checklist:
Oh, the wise old lady.
Oh, the kid is being weird.
Oh, the thing the main character is scared of comes back. (Though honestly, that is oddly competent for you Jeff, kudos!)
Oh, the eldest daughter is kind of a bitch.
Oh, the boyfriend is COMICALLY shit.
Anyway, it has a few goofy, funny things (the dad just leaves for the movie, and the ending has 3 fake outs, and some of the monsters are very "Coraline"), but no Lindy Booth in this one, so zero stars.
Kudos Jeff, I want more shit movies like this.

"Lisa Frankenstein" - Review

A few years after surviving an axe murderer who killed her mother, Lisa (Kathryn Newton, on the rise and somebody I am happy to see doing well) has moved to a new town, where she is shy, withdrawn, and awkward. Living with her quiet father (Joe Chrest, from "Stranger Things"), her viciously, emotionally abusive stepmother Janet (Carla Gugino, fuck yeah!) and her popular, bouncy stepsister Taffy (Liza Soberano); she attempts to navigate the perils of highschool, her only friend is a long deceased man (Cole Sprouse) who, after a lightning strike, awakens from his grave...

Scripted by Diablo Cody, firmly trying to recapture the magic of "Jennifer's Body" and the funnier parts (and queer energy) of "Juno", and directed by Zelda Williams in her debut feature, it's an odd duck.
The script tries packing in the sassy, quirky zingers and attempts at queer energy, but almost reverse engineered, and the tone and direction aim for indie quirk, and the two never quite align, despite excellent performances from Newton and Soberano. Williams adds some good touches, like animated sequences and touches and nods to "Bride of Frankenstein" in some surreal dream sequences, and the bright, poppy and colourful design and aesthetic comes together nicely. But the energy is never quite there, and is in direct opposition to the direction: so it never clicks or vibes the way it needs to, and feels like they are on different pages. Cody's writing is Marmite at the best of times, so when it's not as good as it could be here, the weaknesses shine brighter, and when Williams is trying to make something a tad more subversive, in an ironic played straight kind of way, it amplifies that yet again.
Still, the performances are nice, and it's harmlessly charming and quirky enough.
Fun fact: I didn't actually nkow this was set in 1989 until Lisa stated the year: I just thought they were all hipsters.

"Dune: Part 2" - Review

On the run from the Harkonnen family after they murdered his father and burned his house to the ground, Paul Atreides (Timothy Chalomet) is living among the Fremen on the planet Arrakis. Alongside his mother (Rebecca Ferguson), he learns the ways of these people, and dreams of the day he shall enact vengeance upon the Harkonnens. But as he falls for local girl Chani (Zendaya), he finds himself the subject of worship from Fremen leader Stilgar (Javier Bardem), who believes him to be a prophesised saviour who shall lead The Fremen to Paradise, Paul must also contend with nightmares up and down his walls about killing millions as a result of this prophecy - yet if he wishes to succeed in his goals, maybe this prophecy must come true...

Spellbinding

"Wicked Little Letters" - Review

It is the 1920s, and the quaint English town of Shirehampton is under attack.
Somebody is sending vulgar, profanity fuelled letters to upstanding Christian woman Edith Swan (Olivia Colman) and her stuffy parents Edward and Victoria (Timothy Spall and Gemma Jones). The latter 2 suspect brash, bolshy Irish neighbour Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley), and all seems open and shut. But when new Women Police Officer Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan) raises doubts about this theory, she is ignored and the community finds itself confronting a spiralling secret of vulgarity going against the norms they have been raised upon!

A fairly funny, foul mouthed little film really elevated by the performances of Colman and Buckley. Whilst some of the humour gets a bit broad and "Saturday morning sitcom", it keeps a good pace, weaves a fine line between multiple genres, and stays pretty funny. At the end of the day, it's a solid little film about frustration, and the social norms of the time and how they constrict and ruin us, and the burgeoning beginnings of breaking free of it.
Plus I get to see Dame Eileen Atkins say "Fuck them up their fucking arseholes" and swig from a canteen.