When asked what makes Queen different from any other band, Freddie Mercury is quick with an answer. “We’re four misfits who don’t belong together, we’re playing for the other misfits. They’re the outcasts, right at the back of the room. We’re pretty sure they don’t belong either. We belong to them.”

In 1980, when Queen’s “The Game” came out, I was that eight-year-old misfit. Too chubby, too weird, too loud, too nice. I hated school because it meant getting beat up every single day. And even on a day when I’d get the opportunity to bring in a record for music class, the other kids would all make fun of me. I didn’t listen to popular music, but brought in the band’s “News of the World” album, with a Frank Kelly Freas cover of a robot killing people, including Queen itself. No one liked it. In fact, they hated it. But when “Another One Bites the Dust” came out that year, more than a few of them learned about the power of Queen.

Queen was always too much in the best of ways. They’ve continued to be there for the best and worst moments of my life. In fact, the solo on “We Will Rock You” is probably my favorite of all time, as you can hear the hum of Brian May’s guitar even before the first note is played. When this movie was announced, I worried, as how could any movie, no matter how huge, capture the spirit of Queen?

Originally announced in 2010, with Sacha Baron Cohen cast as Mercury before leaving in 2013 because of creative differences, the film sat unmade until Rami Malek (TV’s Mr. Robot) was cast in November 2016.

Directed by Bryan Singer (the X-Men films, Apt Pupil and The Usual Suspects), the film concentrates on Freddie Mercury while also touching on the rest of the band.

It starts when young Farrokh Bulsara is just a college student and airport baggage handler who has been following a band named Smile. After one of their shows, he meets Brian May (Gwilym Lee, guitarist in the band Male Friends and a near identical twin for the man he’s playing) and drummer Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy, who played Archangel in Singer’s X-Men: Apocalypse). With their lead singer quitting, he joins the band along with bassist John Deacon (Joe Mazzello, the kid from the original Jurassic Park).

After selling their van to finance their first album, the band quickly signs to EMI, travels to America and Freddie adopts his stage name as his real name. He also gets engaged to Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton, who is great in this) while beginning to question his sexuality, including a scene where he stares at a truck driver played by Adam Lambert, who has performed with Queen.

That’s the crux of people’s worries with the film — that the movie plays hard and fast with the facts of Mercury’s sexuality and AIDS-related death. Many believe Mercury learned he had HIV between 1986 and 1987, but not before Live Aid in 1985 as depicted in the film. He didn’t tell the band until 1989.

But back to the movie — when Queen record their fourth album “A Night at the Opera” they end up leaving EMI when Ray Foster (a made-up person loosely based on EMI chief Roy Featherstone, who was actually a fan of the song) refuses to release a six-minute long single. There’s an interesting meta moment here, as Foster is played by Mike Myers, whose use of the song in Wayne’s World led to it being loved by a whole new generation. The best part of this scene is the triumph of the song being released, only for horrible reviews to emerge. Such is Queen — they didn’t belong to critics.

Freddie falls for Paul, the band’s manager, and comes out as bisexual to his fiancee. They live next to one another for years, but Freddie is hurt when she finally moves on. The band has ups and downs, but Freddie decides to leave in 1982, recording an album for CBS for more money than he could make with Queen.

This is another fallacy, as doing a solo record is seen as Freddie sinning against the band. The trust is that Taylor released “Fun in Space” and “Strange Frontier” while May released “Star Fleet Project” years before Mercury’s “Mr. Bad Guy” was recorded.

Also, remember that when the band breaks up before Live Aid, that never happened. Queen released “The Works” in 1984 and toured all over the world to support it, with the final date just two weeks before they played that massive charity event.

That said, the end of the movie is amazing. The performance at Live Aid is captured perfectly, featuring the songs “Bohemian Rhapsody”, “Radio Ga Ga”, “Hammer to Fall” and “We Are the Champions.” I also thought that they used archival footage of Bob Geldof, but it’s really Dermot Murphy. In a nice bit of caemo work, look for Brian May and Roger Taylor in this scene as they watch from the rafters.

Interestingly enough, Singer didn’t even finish the film. He often showed up late to set or disappeared for long stretches, including three straight days after the Thanksgiving break, at which point cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel took over. Singer was fired and 20th Century Fox terminated his production deal before finishing the movie with new director Dexter Fletcher, who is also directing the Elton John bio Rocketman. However, the Director’s Guild assigned sole directed credit to Singer.

If you’re seeking an examination of Mercury’s refusal to come out and how he dealt with AIDS, as well as his identity as Indian-British Parsi man, this isn’t that movie. This is Queen’s greatest hits, an exploration of their music less than one of the truth. It’s packed with plenty of audience-pleasing moments instead of personal revelations. Maybe we’ll get that movie someday. This isn’t it. And that’s fine — I never expected it to be.

Remember when movies used to be a tight, compact 90 minutes or less? There was a moment during this one — this has happened more than a few times lately — where I paused the movie and figured there could only be twenty minutes left. Nope. There were still 51 intolerable minutes of bonecrunching, screaming into the microphone pain, drunk fighting in the tub ennui left to go.

You know how you can tell this movie is a bloated mess? Even the trailer is more than three minutes long.

The first time A Star Is Born was made was way back in 1937, when Janet Gaynor played a young actress and Fredric March the star who introduced her to the industry. It was remade in 1954 with Judy Garland and James Mason, then most famously in 1976 with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, perhaps less famously in 2013 as Aashiqui 2 with Aditya Roy Kapur and Shraddha Kapoor and now, we have Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper.

Let’s get the nice parts out of the way: Lady Gaga is amazingly talented as a singer and is a pretty decent actress, too. I’m all for anything she wants to do with her career, as she’s been really solid in just about everything I’ve seen her try her hand at. But man, this movie…I was about an hour into it and looked over at my wife, who was overly enthused about watching it due to how attractive she finds Bradley Cooper. Throw in a beard and a cowboy look and I had been told numerous times just how attractive Mr. Cooper was to the point of near absurdity. Surely she would be enjoying this film. Nope. She shot me a look and then said, “There’s no way you can be enjoying this horrible movie.”

Proof of just how much Becca liked A Star Is Born.

Jackson “Jack” Maine (Cooper, who also directed and co-wrote this film) is a country music star battling addictions and tinnitus who we first meet on stage. He’s in California and just looking for a bar when he ends up at a drag bar that of course features a real woman singing as the lead performer, which is how I assume all these things work out. Ally (Gaga) and he fall quickly in love, despite the fact that she punches a guy in a cop bar for reasons that are never really disclosed. Pretty much everyone’s behavior in this movie is like the bars in my hometown around 1:55 AM. If they can’t get some action, they’re gonna punch you right in the puss.

Jack invites Ally to his next show, where she plays hard to get for all of seven seconds. He brings her on stage with him, then passes out right when they’re about to make love. She’s upset, because after all, she took the special time to go into the bathroom and dry her lady business and underarms down with a hotel towel for this.

Somewhere in all of this, they visit the ranch where Jack and Bobby — his older half-brother tour manager played by Sam Elliot, who really deserves better — grew up. Turns out that Bobby sold the land, so the brothers get in a fist fight. Then, Ally meets Rez, a combination music producer and manager who takes over Ally’s career, taking her from country to pop.

This is where the film shows how out of touch it is with culture, as these days, pop and country are pretty much the same thing. After all, just ask Hootie, who did more than just fine becoming a country artist. Jack starts getting drunker and angrier and drunker and saltier and angrier and passes out after doing drugs at a pharmacy trade show he plays for money. I mean, first off, if you’re gonna do a pharmacy trade show, that’s the best place to smash up some Somas with your boot and do rails of them. Also: if your entire character arc is that you want your girl to have artistic integrity, have some yourself. But let me get to that in a bit.

This is where Dave Chapelle shows up for no real reason at all as an old bandmate named Noodles. Jack proposes to Ally with a ring made out of guitar string and they get married by Eddie Griffin. You might think that I made up most of the previous sentences, but no. I didn’t. Other films non sequiters are the plot of this rambling mess.

As Ally’s star goes up — she’s on SNL with Alec Baldwin! — Jack goes down. They get in a fight about one of her songs being about a guy’s ass and he calls her ugly while she’s in the tub. If it can get any worse, he gets wasted before his tribute to Roy Orbison — who again, deserves better — and then pisses himself on stage while Ally wins the Best New Artist Grammy. I literally yelled from the kitchen, “I predict he pees on himself at the Grammys,” because most of my humor is of the grade school variety. Imagine my glee when I was shown that I was correct.

Ally’s dad — Andrew “Dice” Clay! — yells at Jack and our hero, such as he is, goes to rehab where we learn that he’s tried to kill himself since he was thirteen. Look, I know alcoholism is a disease and all that, but throughout the entire film, Jack has been nothing but selfish. There are no moments where you see goodness in him, only someone who becomes an ogre to his wife when she achieves her dreams. Even after he gets out, she puts her entire career on hold for him. After all, the mean music producer/agent doesn’t want her husband on tour so she just cancels everything.

Jack responds to the love of a good woman by hanging himself while she plays the biggest concert of her life, again proving that he’s nothing but a complete waste of humanity. The dog he adopts is the only good thing about him.

Ally then takes his name and sings the love song he wrote to her at a tribute, which is some redemption, one would think. But really, after way more than two hours of a drunk treating her horribly, it all just makes her seem pretty weak. I mean, at no point did Ally realize that her career success was all due to her hard work and talent. Somehow, all of Jack’s behavior is worthy of cannonization.

Did you get the idea that I didn’t like this one? Oh man — you’d be right. Brevity is the soul of wit and this bloated mess just went on and on, pretty much like this review. Lots of people loved this, it’s going to win plenty of awards and I honestly don’t get it. It’s not for me. It may be for you, if you want to suffer through a clueless woman dealing with a manipulative man child on her way to fame that may ultimately be soulless.

No one speaks — everyone either mumble whispers or screams loudly directly into your ear, which rings with the sound of deafness. This movie is as subtle and interesting as a drunk warbling an Alan Jackson song at supersonic volume, then crying about what a loser her man is before peeing into a garbage can in the bar’s bathroom.

You may — or may not — have noticed that for all the Argento films I’ve reviewed, I’ve never spoken about 1977’s Suspiria. This supernatural horror — not giallo — movie is hard for me to write about because it’s above reproach. It is, as I’ve mentioned about other films, an absolute movie, one whose kaleidoscopic and sonic assault — courtesy of Goblin — blast you from the moment the film begins. I can’t really say anything new or add anything that hasn’t been said and I doubt anyone wants to read me gushing about the colors or murders in the film ad nauseam. If you haven’t seen it, do so. Please watch it instead of this movie.

That’s the hardest part of this article. I am predisposed to hate this movie. And I’ve tried to be objective and open-minded, because in the past, I’ve hated movies before I even had the chance to watch them. I didn’t want this to be the case. I wanted to not be taken in by the hype or other reviews and watch this on its own merits. But I’ll be honest: it really has none. If it were a movie by any other name, no one would care about it.

Life is short and there isn’t enough time to tell people how much you love them or to enjoy all the magical art and fun there is in the world, so wasting two hours and thirty-two minutes on this meandering slop has me a little peeved. And that’s when I remember the indulgent reviews and the top movies of the year list that this topped. Have the standards for what makes a great movie really slipped so much in the last decade or two? Of course, they have. That’s a rhetorical question.

Now, I could raise issues like the fact that at no time did I know or care about the characters and their motivations, but in truth, the original has the same problems. It’s kind of patently ridiculous to complain about narrative structure when you’re discussing a film inspired by Argento.

Maybe I never danced. Maybe I don’t speak enough German. Or French. Maybe I don’t appreciate winter colors. These are the questions that, well, pirouetted through my head as I endured this movie. It had that dreaded moment where I paused the film, sure that this had to be the conclusion of the proceedings, only to discover I still had fifty-one minutes of pain left, minutes that would feel like the hand on the stove versus the time spent with a beautiful woman.

Let me see if I can summarize this: Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson, who has darkened my screen way too many times recently and yet I give her chance after chance, perhaps because her dad was the voice of Chuckles in GI Joe: The Movie and her mom was both Cherry 2000 and Holly Body) is a Mennonite from Ohio who gets into the Markos Dance Academy in West Berlin. The school is still recovering from the loss of another student, Patricia (Chloë Grace Moretz) who disappeared after she told her therapist Josef Klemperer that all of her teachers are witches.

Just a moment here to let you know that Tilda Swinton as Madame Blanc, Mother Helena Markos and Dr. Josef Klemperer (which she is credited for as Lutz Ebersdorf, with Eber meaning boar/swine and dorf meaning town, hence the last name is Swinton). You won’t be snowed by this stunt casting. In fact, you’ll notice it and keep wondering about it and it will make you escape the flimsy plot and wonder when you can put another movie in your blu ray player. It’s amazing to see Swinton in what manages to be an Eddie Murphy role, ala Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, where you keep saying, “Look, there she is. She’s in a man costume. Now she’s herself. Now she’s an old woman! Wow!” Except you don’t really say wow. There’s no moment that I uttered those three letters and I had plenty of running time to get them out of my mouth.

The truth is that the Three Mothers — Mater Tenebrarum, Mater Lachrymarum, and Mother Suspiriorum — are running things. Susie will be their instrument of taking out others, like Olga, who is basically turned inside out by dance. Supposedly this scene upset people so badly that they left. I have no idea why. I mean, it’s certainly gross, but nothing that blew my mind as was promised.

Also: why is there so much pee in this movie?

The witches all have an argument about who is in charge and decide that Mother Markos, an ancient crone who has controlled the coven for as long as anyone can remember, will remain in control and get a new body. All of the witches taunt a cop who comes to investigate and also have knives that look like rib bones.

All sorts of exploration — by another student named Sara — leads to her leg being broken and her switching eyes with Susie, then they all dance this performance called Volk. Sara dances robotically, controlled by the slowly giving in to evil person who we’ve been led to believe is our heroine. The dancing nearly kills everyone, because like fashion, dance is danger. As Klemperer escapes the performance, he meets up with his wife (original star Jessica Harper) who he thought long dead. In truth, she leads him back to the school.

I have no idea how to put together the end of all this, but damn, I’m gonna try. Susie renounces her mother, who dies somewhere in Ohio, just as that old woman — who has been on her deathbed for the entire movie — mentions that her daughter is the stain that she let loose on the world. That’s because everyone else is a false mother and Susie really is Mother Suspiriorum. Nearly everyone dies by being danced to death. There’s also so much red light in this scene that it becomes difficult to watch. This aspires to high art, one assumes. I could also be totally off and there’s some intricate meaning that I haven’t grasp, but I also compared this movie to an Eddie Murphy fart movie a few paragraphs ago.

Somehow, Blanc and Klemperer survive. Then, Susie comes to his bedside and explains how his wife died in a concentration camp before erasing his memories. Actually, I had no idea that that was what happened and Wikipedia was my friend, so there you go.

After the credits, Susie breaks the wall of reality and erases the audience’s memories, which is an awesome idea, because then they can forget the sheer boring snail race that they just crawled through. Sadly, I shut the movie off before this happened so I will have to always live with the Bataan Death March-like pain of this inept piece of offal.

Other than that, Mr. Lincoln, did you enjoy the play?

Thanks for asking.

Before Luca Guadagnino directed this, David Gordon Green was attached, in his bid to ruin every auteur horror film that I have ever loved. He had to settle for last year’s Halloween, another movie I hope I never have to see ever again. Then again, seeing as how my wife just bought the DVD, all hope is gone.

I also have no idea what the Red Army Faction and Lufthansa Flight 181 subplot had to do with any of this. Maybe I’m on the side of Richard Brody from the New Yorker, who said that this movie “…has nothing to say about women’s history, feminist politics, civil violence, the Holocaust, the Cold War, or German culture. Instead, Guadagnino thrusts some thusly labeled trinkets at viewers and suggests that they try to assemble them. The result is sordid, flimsy Holocaust kitsch, fanatical chic, with all the actual political substance of a designer Che T-shirt.”

Suspiria desperately wants to be about something, anything, to appear to be a movie that matters. It is, to use that hoary old chestnut, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. As much as I like Radiohead, that sound here is blah. As much as I like drone, it doesn’t work here, as the soundtrack is bleats and blips against a grey canvas that does not inspire.

It might be about women. It might be about 1977. It might be about witches. But ultimately, it is a film about nothing. It has convinced some of the filmgoing public that it has deep and meaningful things to say. I’ve always seen the original as a haunted house on film — a bewildering odyssey into colors, noise and terror. It ends just like a real-life scarehouse — Jessica Harper’s Suzy is running away from the burning school, a smile on her face, breathlessly alive despite all she has witnessed. It’s the exhilarating thrill of someone working as hard as they can to scare you and the release that comes from that. None of those feelings were conjured here. The only one I received was relief that I could finally turn this off as the credits ran.

Plus, there’s also the issue of the film being sued for copyright infringement by the estate of artist Ana Mendieta, with a total of ten images being mentioned as direct lifts of the artist’s work. A settlement has been reached, but I guess true art still steals?

Guadagnino has mentioned making prequels and sequels to this film. There are no films I look forward to watching less, unless someone forces me to watch this again.

I have night terrors. Every few evenings, I wake Becca up as I start screaming. Usually, the dream that causes this to happen is one where I’m looking at the sky and suddenly see a UFO which begins to follow me. I’ve had this dream since I was a kid, when Battlestar Galactica ended with that disclaimer about Project Blue Book. I was convinced from them on that I was about to be abducted.

Strange other-worldly sounds are being heard echoing all over the Earth, so a group of researchers, led by expert ufologist Lorraine Gardner (Angela Cole, White Boy Rick), start tracking down the sounds to their point of origin and come face to, well, whatever face an alien grey has.

There are two scenes in here that are going to totally fuel the night terrors I mentioned before. First, a scene where the main characters sit in the grass and stare at the sky as a UFO fades away, hoping that it doesn’t come back. And then there’s an Emergency Broadcast System alert of an Unidentified Flying Object landing and its inhabitants attacking people. It feels real.

Otherwise, there’s a lot of screaming and teenagers in peril, facing off against Adobe After Effects powered spaceships and rubber suited aliens. That’s not a bad thing. I had fun with this and if you enjoy abduction or alien tales, you probably will too.

Fighting the Sky beams up to digital and DVD on February 5.

NOTE: The movie’s PR team sent this our way, but that doesn’t have any impact on our review.

Remember when Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction made their initial splash for Quentin Tarantino and studios rushed to get their own chopped up narrative films in theaters? Killing Zoe, 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag, 2 Days in the Valley, Smoking Aces and plenty more, it seemed like everyone was trying to make a movie that didn’t follow a linear track, had overly erudite killers with a skewed moral code and plenty of strange MacGuffins. As if 1992 was back again, I threw Bad Times at the El Royale into our blu ray player and sat back to watch.

One night in 1969, on the California/Nevada border, seven strangers all spend the night in a shady hotel — the  El Royale itself. The hotel — which has seen better days — is split in half between the two states and is pretty much a “pervert hotel” now, although once it was home to the Rat Pack when they weren’t in Reno or Las Vegas (the hotel is based on the Cal Neva Resort and Casino that was once owned by Sinatra).

Catholic priest Daniel Flynn (Jeff Bridges), singer Darlene Sweet (Cynthia Erivo, the best part of this movie), vacuum salesman Laramie Seymour Sullivan (Jon Hamm) and Emily Summerspring (Dakota Johnson) all arrive and wait for the hotel’s only worker, Miles Miller (Lewis Pullman).

Much like Tarantino, each section of the story overlaps and features title cards. It starts with the reveal that Sullivan is really an FBI agent who was sent to remove listening devices in one of the rooms. After finding double digits worth of them, he also discovers a tunnel filled with one-way mirrors and cameras that film everything in each room. Although he witnesses what he thinks is a kidnapping in Emily’s room, he is told by no less than J. Edgar Hoover himself to not interfere and to sabotage all of the vehicles so that no one can leave until he finds a critical piece of film. However, he can’t stop himself from trying to rescue Emily’s captive, who ends up being her sister, Rose (Cailee Spaeny). Emily ends up blowing him away with a shotgun.

Meanwhile…

Father Flynn and Sweet have dinner at the hotel’s automat diner. She notices him spiking her drink, so she knocks him out and tries to escape. As she watches Emily murder Sullivan, he recovers and discovers the hidden hallway and Miles confesses that the management of the hotel has asked him to film incriminating moments. However, he has kept one film that incriminates a recently killed public figure. As Miles watches the hostage situation in Emily’s room, he catches buckshot from her killing Sullivan right in the face.

Sweet tries to escape, but the cars have all been played with. Father Flynn gets into her car and reveals that he’s really a criminal who has spent the last ten years in jail only to learn that he has dementia. He knows that his brother (Nick Offerman) has hidden money in the hotel, but he has no idea which room it’s in. He offers to split the money if she’ll let him in her room. As she sings (this scene took over twenty takes of live singing), he finds the money.

Emily and Rose discover the tunnel and start to question Miles, who somehow survived. The older sister has removed the other from a cult run by Billy Lee (Chris Hemsworth, who even has his own Hairdresser to Mr. Hemsworth employee in the credits), a Manson-esque figure who is responsible for the killings we keep seeing on the TV in the hotel’s bar. Even worse — he’s on his way to the El Royale.

The killer and his cult arrive, playing a brutal game of roulette with the lives of the survivors. After a Mexican standoff — yes, another Quentin trope — lives are lost, people are absolved and a few people survive.

This is 2 hours and 21 minutes long and the last act feels like forever, with near glacial pacing. At first, I defended it to my wife that everything was leading to this. However, it went on. And on. And then on some more.

This movie was written, produced and directed by Drew Goddard, who also directed The Cabin in the Woods as wrote Cloverfield and adapted World War Z for the screen. He was also part of Deadpool 2 and will be working on the next sequel, X-Force.

TV lovers will enjoy seeing William B. David (the Cigarette Smoking Man from The X-Files) show up as a judge and Jim O’Heir (Jerry from Parks and Recreation) as Reno host. These are simply cameos, but still nice to see these actors in a major movie.

Some may enjoy this film, but the more I thought of those unremarkable wannabe Tarantinos, the more this film felt like it fit right in. It’s certainly not a bad film, but it’s not one that you need to go out of your way to see. It just is. With time so limited these days, I feel like things have to be better than just fine.

Teen punks, on the run from the cops and hiding out in the woods, face off against the local authority– an unhinged park ranger with an axe to grind. I’ve been wanting to see this movie for awhile — how can you not want to see a film with this tagline? “Each year, millions visit our national parks. Not everyone gets to leave.”

After the police raid their favorite club — and one of them stabs a cop — a gang of punks decide to hide out at Chelsea’s (Chloe Levine, The Defenders) dead uncle’s cabin. There’s an initial confrontation The Ranger (Jeremy Holm, Mr. Robot, House of Cards) who is kind to our heroine (a flashback shows him cutting off the crusts of a sandwich for her and asking to be remembered as the cops arrive), yet in the face of everyone else.

This is Jenn Wexler’s debut feature and it totally has the punk rock feel of Return of the Living Dead, which is a huge compliment. Plus, in this interview, music supervisor Middagh Goodwin talked about just how important it was to have a great soundtrack that would lead to viewers discovering some great punk bands.

That same park ranger who helped Chelsea years ago has now gone completely off the rails and is ready to stop these punks from vandalizing his park, much less blasting loud music and tossing their beer cans everywhere. It’s not like he didn’t warn them from the beginning.

Holm is just great in this, a true joy to watch. It’s interesting to see a slasher villain who isn’t tormented or disfigured or conflicted about what he does. He tells one of his victims that he’s sorry that things had to be this way, but he has a job to do keeping these woods clean — and then he heartily chuckles.

A lot of the story has to do with what exactly happened between Chelsea, her uncle and The Ranger. Did she shoot him? Was he killed by wolves? Can she even trust herself with all the junk in her system and the way her memories have been hidden?

I really dug this one. It’s a film that throws it back to the slasher 80’s but certainly could have fit within it. It’s a bit smarter than your average slasher was, but has no shortage of gore along the way.

You can grab The Ranger at Redbox now, pre-order the DVD or blu ray at the official site or just wait until it shows up on Shudder later this year.

Hell Fest is unapologetically a slasher film, bringing together six teenagers to be stalked, slashed and brutally offed by a masked killer who never speaks, only mumbles a child’s song and has no apparent motivation other than the need to kill. This fact has been harped on by nearly every reviewer — it’s derivative and has no explanation for the villain. Obviously, none of them were around for the slasher cycle. This is a film that has no need to be elevated or called anything other what it is — a popcorn horror movie that’s out to entertain you by any means necessary. It’s exactly what I hoped for — a competently made film with plenty of jump scares and no shortage of the red stuff.

Hell Fest is a traveling horror theme park that — for now — is making its home in Cincinnati (that said, the film is shot in Atlanta, using the Six Flags Over Georgia’s Fright Fest decorations and the haunters from the Netherworld Haunted House). A young girl is separated from her friends and soon murdered by The Other (Stephen Conroy, who has quite the resume for his stunts). As the camera pulls back from her corpse, we notice that she’s now become a prop in the haunted house.

Natalie (Amy Forsyth, who braved the No End House on the SyFy show Channel Zero) comes back to town to ger former apartment where her best friend Brooke is now living with Taylor (Bex Taylor-Klaus, Dumplin’). Our heroine doesn’t get along with the new roomie and the feeling is mutual. But things have been off lately — instead of partying, she’s only cared about school and work. But this weekend, she’s here for a good time, which means that she gets set up with Gavin as the girls get VIP wristbands for Hell Fest, along with Brooke’s boyfriend Quinn and Taylor’s man Asher.

Natalie first notices The Other in line, as a girl insults the haunters and yells at the killer. He steals a snow cone knife and stalks her through a maze as the girls are seperated from the boys. In the last section of the haunt, that very same girl appears and they think she’s just one of the actors. The Other kills her in front of Natalie, who demands that she just get it over with, not knowing that she’s seeing the real thing.

The killer stalks the group as they move through the massive Hell Fest, including stealing photos of Natalie and Gavin making out in a photo booth. As the teens move into the more intense sections of the park — the Dead Lands — The Other begins offing them one by one. But he’s also pretty inventive, stealing Gavin’s phone to stay in touch with Natalie. As the group rides into the next section of the park, it’s revealed that there are many Others and it’s simply a mask worn by employees.

However, after a haunter dressed as The Fly sprays Natalie with goo, she cleans herself up in the bathroom while reconnecting with her best friend Brooke. She texts Gavin and hears his phone beep in the next stall, revealing that The Other has been after her the whole time. There’s a great part here where she’s drying her hair and we just see him show up and touch her hair and disappear that’s incredibly well shot.

They try and inform security, but the guard tells them if he arrested every employee that scared someone, there wouldn’t even be a Hell Fest. While all that’s going on, Taylor agrees to be beheaded on stage as part of a magic show. The girls believe that the killer is really going to get her, but it’s all part of the act…until the killer reveals himself backstage.

Taylor escapes, only to be sliced up in public, causing a panic and the two final girls — Natalie and Brook — go on the run from The Other.

The best part of this film? Tony Todd plays The Barker, whose voice is in every ride and attraction, as well as appearing on stage for the magic show. It’s always a joy to see him in any film and his distinctive speech pattern made me applaud from my couch.

What really pushed this movie forward for me was the skill that director Gregory Plotkin (who edited Get Out and Happy Death Day) and cinematographer José David Montero displayed. There’s plenty of moody fog and Bava-esque lighting, as well as the kind of stalk and slash jump scares that I felt the Halloween remake was sorely missing.

Hell Fest is nothing more than a slasher in the best traditions of the genre. And that’s exactly what it should be. There’s an eye decimating kill that will please Fulci fans, someone’s head gets smashed open with a hammer and all manner of folks are placed in danger by a killer who could really be anyone. Sure, there could have been more subtext. Of course, there could have been more motivation. But really, all we want out of a haunted house is to show up, be scared and have plenty of fun. This movie does exactly what it was made to do and does it quite well.

After being denied the bonus and getaway that he was promised, a low-level mobster is nearly killed by the boss that he’s trusted for his entire life. Now, he’s coming back to get what’s rightfully his by force in writer/producer/director Ashley Scott Meyers’ latest movie.

Known for the film Ninja Apocalypse and writing Snake Outta Compton, Meyers is also behind the site Sell Your Screenplay. Here, he tells the story of Rob (Gunner Wright), who is trying to get what’s his from Kain (James Aston Lake, who did stunts in Deadpool).

Rob had been a courier for Kain and was caught by the police, but agreed to stay quiet and just go away. However, Kain sends killers after him instead. The cops are also on their way to try and get everyone put away while Rob’s girl Gina (Candice Bolek) is caught in the middle.

This movie aspires to be a Tarantino-esque film despite its low budget. James Ashton Lake is pretty funny in his role, but it feels like there could have been a bit more twists and turns in the tale. I’m also not a fan of CGI gunshots and wounds over practical effects, but understand the budgetary concerns.

You can watch this for free with an Amazon Prime membership.

Note: I was sent this movie by its PR team but that has nothing to do with this reviewer’s thoughts.

Damian Seryph (Leo Wyatt from TV’s Charmed and Sleepwalkers) is a police detective with a haunted past and a head full of visions he can’t understand. As he investigates a series of cult murders, he learns that they worship the four king demons of Hell and are planning on bringing them to Earth to start the Apocalypse. Can he come to grips with both his birthright and destiny?

With a name like Damian Seryph, he better! He soon learns that “The stories are real and Lucifer came to Earth to start his bloodline. To protect all of us!” By the end of the film, he’s the “devil of devils,” arms tattooed with symbols that can become filled with fire and ready for a few sequels.

Along the way, there are plenty of Satanic rituals and even some Elizabeth Bathory style bloodletting into a bathtub, for those that enjoy that sort of thing. It’s a pretty decent film — sure, it’s made on a smaller budget, but if that stops you from enjoying movies, why are you even on our site?

The Demonologist will be available on Demand starting January 1.

DISCLAIMER: I was sent this movie by its PR team, which has no bearing on my review.

Directed by Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland, Gangster Squad), Venom has appeared on plenty of worst of lists this year. I held back judgment until I saw the movie. I can sum it up in one word: underwhelming. But after all, who was clamoring for a Venom movie after Spider-Man 3? Who was needing one in 2018? And after the magic of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, why do filmmakers feel they can still be so lazy with superheroes?

That said, Venom is critic proof. After all, it was a box office success, ultimately earning $855 million worldwide, becoming the fifth highest-grossing film of 2018.

It all comes down to one good thing: Tom Hardy. It’s like this dude has to have the craziest voices in movies. His Eddie Brock voice is just the most need to please accent ever, while Venom, in his own words, is a “James Brown lounge lizard.” The relationship between these two characters — who become one person — is the best part of the movie. Hardy also improvised a lot, such as when he jumps into a lobster tank to cool down. I kind of love that the dude was pretty much making up his own film. The actor claimed that he based his performance on Woody Allen, Conor McGregor and Redman.

Everything else — from the villains to Eddie Brock’s relationships — is as generic as it gets. Big points for having Jenny Slate in here, even if she does nothing. It’s like the film felt it had to give us an origin when all we want to see is Venom break stuff. The end of the film, where he eats a criminal and meets Cletus “Carnage” Kasady (and come on, who doesn’t want to watch Woody Harrelson against Hardy in a battle of accents and overacting) is exactly what everyone really wants, not nearly two hours of generic soldiers and Venom battling Elon Musk.

In the spin of selling this movie, Columbia Pictures president Sanford Panitch claimed that “Venom was considered a spin on a horror film, inspired by the works of John Carpenter and David Cronenberg, but with more pop and fun.” People that say these kinds of things have never seen films by these two directors. Get their words out of your mouth and make better movies.

The hard part of this whole thing is that there’s a tease of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which will either make you say, “I should have just watched that” or “Man, that was such a better movie.”

You know what is great about this movie? The Asian ad campaign, that promised that Venom was the best boyfriend ever. This ad above? It says, “Life’s most beautiful moment is the instant when I hold up an umbrella for you.”

The non-awesome thing? The Eminem theme for the movie. It gets stuck in your head. But it’s so bad — va-va-Venom? Wow. Really?