In my non-movie watching life, I write advertising copy for a living. A lot of that involves the constant search for inspiration as I battle against deadlines. So the central conceit of this movie, which concerns how Mitch Stockridge, a self-help author, gets his story ideas spoke to me. But how’s the final product?

Mitch (Dennis Friebe) has taken his life from being bullied in his teens to a successful career as a self-help author. But it’s not enough. He’ll never please his father. And he’ll never quiet the fans, journalists and even close friends who keep asking him where he gets his ideas. That’s because the truth is stranger than fiction: his ideas come from a monster that lives in his bathroom that he feeds people to. In exchange, he gets a crumpled piece of paper with scrawled ideas that he takes for his own.

After trying to write an actual novel instead of just another self-help guide, Mitch deas with the depression that comes with shooting for the stars and falling short. That’s when he decides to start feeding everyone and everything he can to the creative beast. And all of the people disappearing around him leads to the police investigating him, with Abby the lead detective going for interested to a vendetta to pure hatred. That’s because of more than just this case — one of Mitch’s self-help books inspired her husband so much that he left her and their family behind to chase his dreams.

So is this a real monster? Or is Mitch just crazy? And is Abby just as crazy for starting to believe in it, too?

Now, Mitch wants to prove the critics and his father wrong once and for all. And that means drastic measures and deaths that are way more important than just some girls he’s met in bars and on CraigsList. No, it’s time for his best friend John to meet the teeth of the bathroom monster if he really wants to be a celebrated writer.

There’s definitely a bit of Little Shop of Horrors and Basket Case at work here. I really liked how you never really see the monster, just its teeth and the sounds it makes as it tears apart its meals. There are a lot of questions raised by this film, such as Mitch’s journey from abused child to the caretaker for his father, the pains and sacrifices that it takes to create and the relationships that it costs along the way. I really felt that last part a lot.

This is definitely a low budget film, so go into it knowing that. It looks decent, though, with some solid editing and the leads are way better actors than you’d expect. There aren’t a lot of characters to like, however, as almost everyone is uniformly a bad person. There isn’t anyone to root for or learn from in this. But it is an intriguing meditation on the creative process, even if it feels like there could be more to the overall story.

The film’s IMDB site says that this film will be released on December 1. To learn more, visit the official site.

Disclaimer: I was sent this movie by its PR team, but as you know, that has no bearing on my review.

SPOILER WARNING: We don’t often review movies that are still in the theater, so usually don’t bother with worrying about giving away major plot points. Seeing as how this one is in the theaters right now, you may want to see it. We’d rather not be to blame for giving away plot points, twists and turns or influencing your decision to see it. Movie watching is an incredibly personal experience and we respect everyone’s opinion, even when it’s wrong and we laugh at you in the privacy of our own home about your lack of aesthetics and taste.

Nearly every review of the new Halloween starts out by stating the problematic nature of the franchise. In my perfect world, Halloween 2 would have been the end, with Halloween 3: Season of the Witch starting off a yearly anthology of pre-Samhain related mayhem. But my wife has so much love for this series that she endorses everything save Halloween Resurrection and the second Rob Zombie film. And even then, she’ll still watch those. We can’t hide the fact that we are fans — our shelves speak to it, with multiple versions of the first film and every cut of 6.

That’s why the possibility of a new Halloween film with a major budget, nine years after the last abortive attempt to make one of these films, raised such hope. David Gordon Green, the director of Pineapple Express, along with frequent collaborator Danny McBride would create the film along with the participation of the original creator, John Carpenter and the acting skills of Jamie Lee Curtis. For the last year, we’ve been inundated with the assurances that these creators are people who get what makes Halloween work. This would finally be the sequel that fans had been craving since, oh, 1981.

The first chink in the hype armor, for me at least, was the knowledge that this film would invalidate Halloween 2, being seen as the only sequel that counted. The convoluted history that we mentioned earlier may keep some from understanding the series, but I’ll be honest. There’s no reason why this movie had to erase the second installment. It could have still happened and it wouldn’t impact this film at all.

There’s really no nice way to say this, so let me jump in feet first. Beyond being a movie that fundamentally doesn’t comprehend what made the original Halloween such a great film, the 2018 version of Halloween is a movie with no understanding of what makes a great horror movie, either.

That isn’t to say there isn’t a great set-up. Forty years after the 1978 Haddonfield murders (referred to as “The Babysitter Murders,” a nod to the film’s original title), a Serial-like podcast team makes its way to the area to investigate the story and try to see both sides. The first mistake the journalists make is to show Michael Myers’ mask his iconic mask. This scene is pretty chilling, as the entire yard of Smith’s Grove Sanitarium rises up in chaos, dogs barking, insane men screaming, Myers just silent and not turning his back. Let’s not let the logic of how two podcasters got such a crucial piece of evidence out of police custody or how any hospital in its right mind would allow this interview to happen this way get in the path of the movie.

The podcasters then make their way to the fortress home of Laurie Strode, who has spent the last forty years preparing for Michael’s return. If this seems like 1998’s Halloween H20: 20 Years Later twenty more years later, we should be so lucky. After a quick interview in which the British duo shows that they just don’t get it, Laurie kicks them out.

That night, Dr. Ranbir Sartain and a maximum security crew transport Myers and other prisoners from Smith’s Grove to a maximum security prison. Of course, the bus crashes. Of course, Michael escapes. And of course, the footage echoes the escape from Halloween 4 while simultaneously telling us that that movie no longer exists. There’s a moment here, where Michael kills a young boy, where I felt like this was this film announcing that it wasn’t going to play by the traditional slasher rules. If young kids were fair game, everyone was. Sadly, this was one of the last surprises that the film would have in store.

Michael then finds and kills the podcast team, which has no real emotional heft because we have no reason at all to care whether they live or die. Sure, they tempted fate and must be destroyed in order for him to get his mask back. It’s a brutal scene, putting over the power that Michael has, but if we follow logic, The Shape should by 61 years old. Co-writer McBride stated that “I think we’re just trying to take it back to what was so good about the original. It was just very simple and just achieved that level of horror that wasn’t turning Michael Myers into some being that couldn’t be killed. I want to be scared by something that I really think could happen.” I haven’t seen many 61-year-old men that can throw people around like this. The refusal to embrace the supernatural evil of Myers is one of this film’s first failings.

Back to Laurie Strode. She’s had two failed marriages and had her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) taken away from her at the age of twelve. Today, they have a tenuous relationship, with Karen’s daughter Allyson working the hardest to understand her grandmother. Learning that Myers is loose, Laurie breaks into her daughter’s home and warns her and her husband Ray that they need to be ready. This is another narrative misstep. Are we supposed to believe that Laurie’s PTSD and constant battle readiness has cost her way too much? Or is she the only person who is right in this whole film? The way it plays out, as she’s pretty much the only protagonist who actually does something, proves that she’s correct all along.

That’s one of the critical flaws in this movie. Outside of Laurie, there isn’t a single character that we get to know or care about. Her daughter is someone who has given up connecting with her. That’s her one note. Her granddaughter is in a crappy relationship and wants to get to know her grandmother a little better. And that’s it. Every single other person we meet — save for Dr. Sartain and we’ll get to him later — is just fodder. Contrast this with the original, where we get to know Laurie, Lynda (P.J. Soles shows up so quickly here you don’t even catch her, by the way) and Annie really intimately before the first hint of bloodshed. I defy you to tell me one character’s motivation or reason for being beyond words on a page here. For a movie that aspires to be above and beyond the slashers of the 1980’s, even the worst of those had a character you wanted to root for other than the final girl.

Meanwhile, Michael has started to kill people all over again. Allyson’s friend Vicky is babysitting instead of attending the school dance and she gets slaughtered. The scene where Myers is hiding in the closest was so much better effect in the trailer. Here, the way it’s framed, it loses any narrative punch. That’s when we get to the next flaw in this film: it has no idea how to be suspenseful. There is no moment where you get that heart pumping feeling where the killer is stalking his prey, where you feel compelled to yell out words of help to the hapless victim onscreen. We saw this movie in a totally sold out environment of people ready to shout, scream and shriek. You could have heard a pin drop during this movie.

The only character that seemed to get a reaction was Julian, the young boy who Vicky is babysitting. Now, I’ll be honest. The kid was hilarious. And I’m not one of those people who can’t deal with a little comedy in my horror. But I’m also of the belief that once the horror truly begins, humor becomes a release valve that isn’t always necessary. In fact, Julian is so funny that he breaks the movie here, although he gets off a great line as he exits the film, telling one character that he shouldn’t even go into the house because he’ll definitely get killed.

At this point, Laurie has become Dr. Loomis, patrolling the streets on her own, gun in hand. This is something that the cops have seemingly no issue with. Maybe it’s because Sheriff Frank Hawkins was the cop who stopped Loomis from killing The Shape when he was in police custody. That’s probably better than the original script for this that had Loomis being killed before the police could stop Myers’ original rampage.

For all the time the movie spends in setting up the leader of the police, Sheriff Barker, he never appears again once the carnage really starts. No, instead of the police doing what makes logical sense — putting everyone in protective custody in a location far from Haddonfield — they allow everyone to go to Laurie’s fortified house while they search for Allyson. Keep in mind that Laurie has been wantonly shooting handguns off all over town, so she seems like the most level-headed solution, right?

Allyson is on the run, having found the body of her boyfriend’s geeky best friend impaled on a fence. She doesn’t have to run all that far or all that long. There’s literally no pretense of suspense, as Sheriff Hawkins quickly finds her and they set off for Laurie’s house, while Dr. Sartain makes a miracle recovery after being shot in the heart earlier. Seriously, the guy is near death in one scene and somehow shows up with just a sling and band-aid twenty-five minutes later. Seeing Myers on the way, Hawkins hits him Ben Tramer style with his squad car, due process and Miranda rights be damned. As they inspect the body, the “new Dr. Loomis” reveals himself to be evil, killing the cop and locking Allyson in the squad car along with the stunned Myers. That’s the only other surprise in the film, as the now mad doctor dons The Shape’s iconic mask.

“I realized right then that if this guy was the bad guy for the rest of the movie and that was it for Michael, I was going to just have to walk out of the theater.” That’s a quote directly from my wife, probably the biggest Halloween superfan I’ve ever met.

Luckily for everyone but the characters in the film, Myers survives and makes his way to Laurie’s home, stopping to stomp out Sartain’s brains all over the backyard and kill off Allyson’s dad, who outside of being cool to her boyfriend about doing drugs and bad at baiting mousetraps has no discernable character traits or reasons to exist.

As Laurie puts her daughter into the saferoom she feared as a child, she battles Michael throughout her house in a war that fanservice echoes the initial film. Instead of Michael falling off the balcony and disappearing, this time it’s Laurie’s turn. That said, there’s no real dread or worry for any of the main character’s safety — even Karen ends up having no issues shooting Myers and helping her mother trap him in the basement, which was the goal all along. They blow the house up and drive away in a truck that made me wistful for the end of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the second movie this year after The Strangers: Prey at Night to totally rip off the ending of a much better movie.

What makes the first two Halloween films work is the atmosphere — from the first frame, you realize that something inhuman is coming after Laurie Strode. The second film just amps up the pace and makes The Shape into an inhuman force that cannot be stopped. In this film, he’s just there. At no point do you feel tension from him or worry for the people he has come to kill. Things just happen. It’s sloppy, slap-dash and for all the insults lobbed at the other sequels in this franchise, much closer to parts 5 and 6 than I’m sure the filmmakers would like to admit.

This may be the first Halloween modern filmgoers see. And as such, there is no moment in it that points to what makes Michael Myers special. I can name several from the original, such as the moment where he watches Bob after he kills him or slowly rises up after we’re sure Laurie has killed him. And the end, where his body is just suddenly gone, is the stuff of nightmares. Early in the new version, Vicky’s boyfriend Dave echoes the voice of millennials, saying that Myers’ five murders aren’t such a big deal anymore in the grand scheme of things. I feel for anyone whose initial exposure to this franchise is with this film, one where Myers fails to do one remarkable thing or elicit one moment of fright.

I’ve seen plenty of reviews that state that this is the best sequel in the franchise and a return to greatness. I think that those reviews were written before anyone even saw the film, preordained so that the feel-good story of the return of a much-maligned franchise could come true. I tried to remove myself from the hype, to attempt to be surprised and enjoy Halloween 2018 on its own merits, but it really has little to none.

The sound of Michael’s breathing over the end credits signifies more than the fact that The Shape has survived. No, it means that in two years, we’ll be lining up all over again, hoping that this time perhaps someone can get what seems to be such a simple idea right.

How close is this movie to The Towering Inferno and Die Hard? Just take a look at one of two posters that its star, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, commissioned to celebrate those films when this was released. Look — this is a summer blockbuster. If you’re going to worry about how much it steals or how stupid it is, you picked the wrong movie.

Wealthy Chinese financier and entrepreneur Zhao Long Ji is building the tallest skyscraper in the world in Hong Kong called The Pearl. To solve some of the building’s security issues, he hires former U.S. Marine and retired FBI Hostage Rescue Team leader Will Sawyer (Johnson). Even though he’s built a new life for himself, Sawyer is struggling with the past, including a mission where a suicide bomber took his left leg.

Once he gets the job of inspecting the Pearl, Sawyer, his wife Sarah (Neve Campbell, Scream) and twins Georgia and Henry move in. It seems like the building’s fire and security systems are secure, but he doesn’t trust the building’s offsite security center. Zhao gives Sawyer a tablet that gives him full access to the security system, but our protagonist is set up by his former partner, ex-FBI agent Ben Gillespie.

Now, a cadre of terrorists and criminals led by Kores Botha has taken over The Pearl, with Sawyer’s family trapped inside. Soon, the building is on fire, loved ones are trapped and the film becomes extended stunt sequences where The Rock jumps from a crane into a burning building hundreds of feet above the Earth. Your enjoyment of this film will depend on how many times you want to see The Rock cheat death.

We watched this with Becca’s parents, who were a divided lot. Her mother enjoyed this film more than any living being has ever loved a movie before, jumping and yelling with every single stunt, literally on the edge of her seat. But her father was upset the minute the movie started, sure that it was going to be unrealistic. Well, he was right. He’s also someone unafraid to loudly drum his opinion into your ear for the entire running time of a film, so he threatened to rage quit watching it. It’s not often that you get to watch a movie with two people who have such opposite opinions, yet are sitting so close.

We really do go see new movies sometimes. But as late, our luck has been horrible. The Nun was painful, after all. But we’d seen the trailer for this film a few months back and it looked like Becca’s favorite kind of movie (and Sam’s least) — Gone Girl-style suburban true crime murder mystery. The actual movie, however, deviates wildly from the promise of the trailer.

I saw this movie under protest. After all, I wanted to see Hell Fest. Or The Predator. I could have even hate watched Venom. Because I have been the unfortunate recipient of Gone GIrl — not to mention movies like it such as The Girl on the Train and other works by its author like Sharp Objects and the upcoming Widows — viewings in the triple digits. The funny thing is, I ended up liking it way more than Becca.

Stephanie Smothers (Anna Kendrick from Twilight and Pitch Perfect) is a craft vlogger and single mom who constantly outdoes every other parent through sheer energy. But under her mania lies some pretty dark secrets and little to no real friends, not to mention a man. Emily (Blake Lively) is also a working mom, but is more known as a PR director for a major fashion company. These women couldn’t be more different — Stephanie prefers to hide in the background and apologize while Emily isn’t afraid to stand out and offend everybody.

The friendship between their children brings them together and the playdates their kids have to build the foundation for their fast friendship. They are soon trading confessions: Emily is frustrated with her husband’s lack of success. And Stephanie slept with her half-brother and may have had a child with him, which led to the death of both him and her husband.

Emily then asks for that simple favor: can Stephanie babysit Nicky while Sean is in London and she has to tend to a work emergency? That favor extends for days as Emily goes missing. And once her body is found in a Michigan lake, all hell breaks loose.

That’s when this movie descends into the twists and turns of a whodunit (but not a giallo, as much as I was wanting some black gloved killings and Ivan Rassimov to show up), with Stephanie caught in the midst of Emily’s psychotic ways, Sean’s devotion to her and her suddenly growing popularity amongst the local moms and her internet audience.

The film goes way over the deep end, bringing in the giallo staples of the unknown twin (actually triplet) and a family history of violence and insanity. Jean Smart shows up for all of a minute as Emily’s mother here. 

A Simple Favor is the first movie that Paul Feig has directed since his divisive Ghostbusters reboot. I enjoyed the style in the film and the soundtrack, particularly the usage of Brigitte Bardot and Serge Gainsbourg’s Bonnie and Clyde (actually, the film has multiple Bardot songs).

This is a movie unsure of what movie it really wants to be. Is it a mystery? Is it a comedy? Is it both? It never truly becomes anything, wildly shifting in tone to the point of absurdity — and not in a good way. That said, Lively and Kendrick are quite good in this, much better than anyone else in the film.

I always ask Becca if she has anything she wants to add to our review. She said that she’d give this movie a D or an F, because she wanted it to be closer to the thriller the trailer promised. And she wonders if Anna Kendrick only plays the parts of ditzy nice girls who apologize too much and get into shenanigans all the time, to which I answered, “Yes, I think that’s pretty much who she is in real life.”

Also: I call bullshit on a major plot point. Emily pays cash to rent her car from  Budget Rent-A-Car, which doesn’t allow vehicle rentals without a credit or debit card, much less a valid driver’s license. They would have had a full record of Emily renting the car. It would have been much simpler if she had someone else rent her the car and then paid that person. I realize that I’m being anal retentive about plot holes while I let gigantic ones in Argento movies pass by like bullets through the doorhole in Opera. But come on, people!

Of note, this was based on a novel by Darcey Bell, which has wildly different plot points, such as Emily only being a twin and being less complicit in the death of her sibling, as well as a completely different ending.

Postscript: As we left the theater, we noticed that there were only three other people there. One was an older gentleman in a full three piece suit who sat in front of us. Behind us was a younger couple that Becca asked about their feeling on the film. No one really liked it all that much and the older fellow called me sir while we talked and remarked how much better he likes Agatha Christie than modern mystery. We walked out of the theater late and alone on a Sunday night only for us to realize that the older gentleman was driving his son to a date. His son had to be in his late 20’s/early 30’s and the older man waited in the car for his son to embrace his date and kiss her goodnight. When we said goodbye, he said, “Have a nice week.” It was perhaps the sweetest and strangest thing that has happened to us in some time.

Grey Trace is a man out of time. He’d rather stay in his garage and work on old school combustion engines while the rest of the world wants electric cars that drive themselves. As more and more people are augmenting their human bodies with computers — like the work his wife Asha does for Cobolt — he keeps himself 100% human. But his life is about to change.

Grey has just finished a car for Eron Keen, a mysterious tech inventor who has removed himself from humanity to create life-changing things for his company, Vessel. The guy has his own cloud — not the internet, a cloud — in his home. While there, he shows the Traces his STEM chip that serves as a second brain.

Grey obviously hates the idea, saying that when he sees that chip, he sees more jobs going away. As he and his wife discuss it on the way home, their self-driving car leads them to the slums where Grey grew up. Their car crashes and a gang murders Asha and severs our hero’s spinal cord, forcing him to watch his wife die.

Between the death of his wife, his near-total loss of mobility, being forced to be cared for by his mother and the police’s (including Blumhouse regular Betty Gabriel) inability to catch the killers, Grey decides to kill himself. That’s when Eron offers to install STEM into his body with one catch — he can’t tell anyone.

The chip is a miracle, allowing Grey to move again. Soon, he’s exceeding the limits he had even when he was unharmed. And then, STEM starts talking to him and explaining how he can get revenge.

Upgrade is a movie that continually exceeded my expectations and challenged my assumptions. It starts like a modern version of Death Wish mixed with RoboCop before becoming a sly critique on the invasion of technology into our lives and the military industrial complex. What seems like a balletic modern fight scene is nuanced by the fact that our hero is no longer in control of his body, trying to hide his eyes from the violent vengeance that he is unleashing.

Grey eventually comes face to face with the men who ruined his life, but even they aren’t what they seem. I loved the way this film mixes Cronenberg body horror with military tech — I’ve never seen a bad guy who can sneeze nanite missiles into your bloodstream before. And the way they arms conceal guns that are loaded along their bloodlines is a stroke of genius.

Once our hero starts using his new brain to try and learn why his wife was killed and he was crippled, everyone is against him, including the police and Eron. It all races to a brutal and surprising conclusion where our hero and his new brain both get what they want.

No more spoilers. I’m overjoyed that I came into this movie cold and was continually surprised and delighted by the most minute details of the script.

Filmed in Australia and featuring a cast of Down Under actors, the home of writer/director Leigh Whannell, who you may know better as Specs from the Insidious movies. He’s also written the Saw and Insidious films, as well as directing Insidious: Chapter 3. Of all the Blumhouse releases I’ve seen, this one feels intensely personal. It had me on the edge of my seat, waiting for each new fight, each new reveal, each new surprise.

Assassination Nation has no idea what kind of movie that it wants to be. It’s the kind of film that wants to desperately wants and needs to be important, to provoke you with sex and violence and provocative themes while at the same time giving you a list of potential trigger warnings before the story begins. And yet even that warning is shot in a winking way, like the square up before Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS. I doubt that’s the comparison the filmmakers want, because this is also a film yearning to be important, to be discussed, yet it seems to have disappeared into theaters.

The fact that the movie takes place in Salem, Massasschutesetts is the first of many sledgehammer subtle points that the script makes. There, our four heroines — Lily, Bex, Em and Sarah — are normal teenage girls dealing with high school and growing up and hormones and all the horror that goes with it.

For some, it’s harder than others. Lily has stopped being a babysitter for the Mathers family after the father’s (Joel McHale) attentions got to her. That hasn’t stopped her from continuing to text him and referring to him as Daddy, despite her relationship with Mark (Bill Skarsgard, It). Beks is transgender and has a crush on Diamond, who wants to keep their hookup a secret. Em and Sarah really never get a chance to define who they are, to be perfectly honest.

A wannabe hacker named Marty is asked to spread a file with images and videos of anti-gay Mayor Bartlett having sex with men and dressing in women’s clothes. This causes the mayor to go into a downward spiral and kill himself at a press conference. As the police try to investigate, everyone in town becomes hacked, like Principal Turrell, who is one of the few positive adults in the film. His phone has photos of his child nude, which makes everyone think he’s a pedophile, yet he refuses to stop being an educator. His story kind of stops there, despite all the investment the movie has put into it so far.

From there on out, the town’s secrets are revealed. Cheerleader Reagan (Bella Thorne) leaked her best friend’s (Maude Apatow, daughter of Judd) nude photos and must pay. Lily’s secret sexting older man is revealed and his family leaves him. Lily’s photos and videos that she would send the older man are revealed, which leads to Mark and his friends holding her down and taking photos of her body marks to prove it’s her in a harrowing scene. Her life goes to hell as her parents kick her out, men chase her with knives and the entire town soon believes that she’s behind the hacks thanks to Marty revealing that tons of internet traffic was coming from her house (it’s worth noting that Becca instantly figured out the film’s big reveal here).

Here’s where the film either gets suspenseful or narratively falls apart, depending on your point of view. Everyone in the town starts wearing masks to hide their identity and sins from one another, which is an interesting plot point if the masks they wore didn’t look exactly like The Purge. Again, this is a movie that yearns to be taken seriously with a woke angel on one shoulder while the devil on the other keeps pulling it toward exploitation. Because it never really goes all in on either side, it becomes somewhat of a muddled mess.

That isn’t to say the final scenes aren’t packed with suspense, including a stedicam sequence outside and inside the house as masked assailants invade the home and take the girls hostage that recalls Dean Cundy’s landmark work in Halloween. And the standoff between Lily and Nick, her “daddy,” is filled with eye-popping close-ups and intense violence, with the gore actually grossing out people in our theater versus titillating them.

That’s when the film descends into empowerment fantasy territory, with the girls donning red trenchcoats ala Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion. Most people would probably get past the scene of the girls watching this movie in bed quickly, but it felt like the brakes being slammed for me. You know, this is pure Quentin Tarantino territory — this is obviously some alternate reality where the most popular girls in school all get together to cosplay watch an incredibly deep cut Japanese rape revenge film. That said, you can totally buy the official jacket they wore from the film now.

The girls unleash their vengeance on the town before Lily finds the time to make a viral video that unites all of the young women together as they come face to face in a final confrontation with the masked men of Salem.

If the film stopped here and gave no answers as to why this all happened or what happened next, but instead just kept the narrative that bad things happen for no reason, I may have liked it more. I liked that the fate of the main characters could be left up to the viewer, but the closing scene establishes the true ending.

I think Sam Levinson is a hell of a director. This film looks gorgeous and attempts some really technical sequences, like the home invasion, as well as split screens that would make DePalma jealous. The colors, the textures, the rapid pops as footage zooms in — all gorgeous. But the story is lacking. Lily’s final speech wants so badly to be a rallying cry, but so much of it comes off as an apology that’s an actual lack of apology. Everybody has bad secrets in their closet in Salem, but it’s the young women who have never had a chance to do things the right way — well, at least our four protagonists and their sisters that rally between them, at least — who are the ones in the right. Lily is able to admit that she’s done things that are wrong, but seems to write them off in this speech.

Assassination Nation wants to be Heathers for the SJW generation, vehemently denounced by the establishment and endlessly debated on talk shows and in classrooms, but it seems like no one really cared. Instead, it comes off as “What if Harmony Korine directed The Purge?”

It’s a movie that at the same time wants to empower women and give them a voice while putting masculine weapons into their hands and allowing them to shoot and stab their way to emancipation, skirting the issue that we live in a world where mass shootings happen nearly every single day, but the right good guy or girl with a gun is the narrative difference. If that true, how is your side any more correct than the other side? Instead of picking a side, instead of choosing between parable and pablum, this film makes no such choice.

The credit sequence — in which an African-American marching band drumline steps through the carnage of the town to their version of Miley Cyrus’s “We Don’t Stop” sums up this film perfectly. It looks gorgeous, it seems transgressive and it feels like it has something to say but is ultimately sound and fury signifying nothing.

Slice is a total mess — think a slice of pizza that you piled up high with every single kind of topping you ever wanted and wondered why it was such a doughy mess. But you know what? Sometimes, those kinds of experiments in stoner cooking pay off. And after watching this movie, I felt the same way.

Let me see if I can summarize this rambling bit of wacko into one coherent sentence: In the town of Kingfisher, the truce between the living and the dead is endangered by the murders of several delivery people from Perfect Pizza. There are also witches and werewolves. And a lot of the movie’s story is told through music videos. Oh yeah — Perfect Pizza is also the gateway to Hell.

That’s no accident — the star of the film is Chance the Rapper, who plays Dax, the aforementioned werewolf. And the direction comes from Austin Vesely, who directed several of Chance’s videos. 

Jack (Paul Scheer of How Did This Get Made?) has opened Perfect Pizza over the ashes of the Yummy Yummy Chinese Food restaurant, which was destroyed, and also above the previous ashes of an insane asylum which became a haunted burial ground that is currently inhabited by around 40,000 ghosts. Sean (director Vesely) is killed at the beginning of the film, bringing his girlfriend Astrid (Zazie Beetz, Deadpool 2) back to the shop she thought she left behind.

Is Dax the werewolf the killer? How does Big Cheese and his gang fit in? Is that a zombie working in the pizza shop? How awesome is it to see Hannibal Buress and Chris Parnell in a horror movie? Is this a film audacious enough to have a reporter write her story aloud to help bring all the threads together moments before the film quite literally goes to hell?

This movie is like a 1970’s Fourth World Kirby comic, in that it has 82 million ideas that it tries to fit into 82 minutes. The town of Kingfisher is fascinating — who becomes a ghost? Who becomes a zombie? Why do the witches hare everyone? Why is the occult drawn to take out? This would have worked so much better as a Netflix series, but I’m really just saying that because I wish we had more time to explore the setting and characters, like how Dax doesn’t want to be a hero or villain, but must finally make a choice.

So many of the reviews I’ve read have really taken this movie to task for being unfocused and all over the place. That’s probably why I liked it so much! I’d rather have a movie packed with big ideas and pure craziness than something that bores me.

You can find Slice on Amazon Prime.

As college friends try to hold onto the good old days by staying in touch via the internet, their evening of stories, pranks, drinking and making fun of one another is interrupted by a demon that has been trapped for centuries in Salem, Massachusetts. Seeing as how that demon is on a mission to bring the devil to our reality and how it can also possess multiple people at once, this will be a night that tests their friendship and changes the world forever.

Kendra, AJ, Mar and Dwayne spent time together at THE Ohio State but adulthood is making them grow apart. The only way for them to reconnect is through an all-night video chat. e-Demon captures that night — as well as multiple text messages, Wikipedia pages, message board posts and so much more — ala the films Searching and Unfriended.

The weirdness starts when Gamma introduces his grandmother, who warns of a horrible danger in the trunk that’s in the attic of their family home. The gang has been pranking each other all night with bloody stunts that look real, so when the demon comes to life, it just seems like one more goof. But nope — it’s real and ready to destroy them all.

If you’re looking for a straight-ahead narrative, this isn’t it. Instead, the film is near hyperactive, jumping from screen to screen. But it’s an interesting narrative technique. I wouldn’t want to see every movie in this way, but it works here. The cast are all relative newcomers, but they handle themselves well, basically all acting toward the camera for long uninterrupted takes, reacting to things on their laptops instead of other living people. Actually, the cast being unrecognizable faces really helps tell the story, which slowly grows in intensity.

At first, I was kind of put off by this gimmick, but by the end of the film, particularly with the way it treats the ending, I was hooked.

This is writer/director/producer Jeremy Wechter’s first full-length project. I’ll definitely be seeking out whatever he works on next.

e-Demon is playing in New York at Cinema Village starting tomorrow — complete with Q&A with the director at all showings this weekend. It’s also available on demand and you can get the DVD on Amazon. Learn more at the official site, the e-Demon Resistance Network.

Disclaimer: I was sent this movie by its PR team, but as you know, that has no bearing on my review.