“I hate to say this, but dad’s fracking site may be a good thing this time.”

The Asylum sure loves disaster movies even if they never have the budget to pull it off.

Dr. Cami Weddle (Jessica Morris), a geologist named Dan (Quintin Mims) and her assistant and fiancee Finn (Canyon Prince) all believe that a faultline is about to split the United States in half worse than an election.

Her son Eric (Crew J. Morrow) and his girlfriend Brenda (Roxanne G.C. Brooks) are almost killed in a quake but saved by his mining father Alan (Chris Bruno), all while our heroine is arguing with her daughter Emily (Allison Gold), who wants to move in with dad. Yes, in the middle of this fault line split, there’s a family split in the Weddle household.

There really is a New Madrid Seismic Zone, even if it hasn’t had any quakes since the 1800s. But fracking has caused it to become dangerous and at the same time, all of this natural disaster death will bring back our married couple, unless a rival expert doesn’t nuke the fault. How would that fix anything?

Like every Asylum movie, a couple is on the outs, someone once made a mistake predicting another disaster, a governor (Alison Chace) is corrupt and pays for it with her life and the new fiancee just lets his love go, like a gender swapped Dr. Melissa Reeves.

Directed by Nick Lyon Writers and written by Gil Luna and Joe Roche, this ends in the cheesiest way possible and no one is really all that broken up about all the people who died. Bad relationships conquer all.

My wife asked me if I was reviewing this. I answered positively and she said, “I knew it. It sounds cheap. They couldn’t get good people for this.”

She should post reviews because they would be way meaner than mine.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Moira Cole (Shawnee Smith) lost nearly her entire family when her cousin Lee Morris went insane and killed them all, including her husband Dillon, donning the mask that has led to the media calling him the Skulleton. She tries to live her life afterward, but every October, another sequel to the slasher franchise made about her life story is released and reminds her of the horror that she barely endured.

Directed by Ante Novakovic and written by Anthony and James Gaudioso (who also appear in the film), this film shows how Skulleton survived, as he was rescued after being shot by Moria by his sister Sam (Taryn Manning) and has spent the last decade or more chained up in her basement, drugged out of his mind.

Moria’s sons Michael (Drew Moerlein) and Connor (James Gaudioso) have grown up alternately afraid and angry of the history of their family being known by everyone in the world. Their mother is still withdrawn but working through her emotions with therapist Dr. Lucien (Bruce Dern).

Meanwhile, as a new series of murders starts to happen, their family will have to deal with it all over again, as Detective Cyphers (Tyrese Gibson), Detective Fink (Kresh Novakovic) and James (Anthony Gaudioso) are asking questions.

This is an uneven film that starts with so much promise, feeling like Halloween, which is obvious, as well as Scream. The open is so good and the idea of processing the trauma of this family remains a great idea. However, this starts to crawl just when you want it to fly. I really wanted to love this and ended up barely enjoying it, which is a shame, because Smith is really good — even if she looks younger than her sons — and the killer looks intimidating if a bit too much Spirit Store.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Trinity (Stakiah Lynn Washington) goes by the name of Lady Bars and has dreamed of being a rapper since she was young. Working with her best friend Dante (Melvin Gray Jr.) as her producer, hype man and cheerleader, she finally gets to play her songs for her hero, Young Reckless (Terayle Hill). Sadly, she gets to perform on stage with him on the night that he dies.

Young Reckless’ label, Gold Volt Records, sees her video and watches it, as well as a video of her rapping the song “Sassy”, go viral and decide to add her to their artists, seemingly only to upset Ms. Halo (B. Simone), the label’s star rapper.

Trinity is living her dream, but it all seems like it could be a nightmare once she starts getting stalked and people around her start dying. Who is the giallo-style killer in the midst of the rap game? And is Trinity all good? Did she steal her songs? Or is she using Young Reckless’ lyrics that she found which were also stolen lyrics?

Directed and written by Michael A. Pinckney, this has every stereotype that you might expect, like a record label owner who is making millions but still likes to sell guns, a producer who falls in love with his latest star, an aging star who is mean at first but warms to the heroine and an ending that seemingly sets up a sequel.

That said, “Sassy” is a pretty good song, but I don’t know if I’d kill anyone if they stole it from me.

You can watch this on Tubi.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jennifer Upton is an American (non-werewolf) writer/editor in London. She currently works as a freelance ghostwriter of personal memoirs and writes for several blogs on topics as diverse as film history, punk rock, women’s issues, and international politics. For links to her work, please visit https://www.jennuptonwriter.com or send her a Tweet @Jennxldn

Longlegs is a like the popular small-town cover band you liked in college.

The songs are passable from a technical standpoint but can’t hold a candle to the originals.

Let’s take a look at the hit parade:

Silence of the Lambs, I Saw the Devil, Cure, Zodiac, Lisa and the Devil, Twin Peaks and Exorcist III.

If you’ve seen those, you’ve seen every scene from this movie done better.

That’s not to say it’s all bad. Longlegs is a movie that looks great and does a decent job of convincing a large segment of the movie going public that it’s better than it is. Plus, you’ve got Nic Cage doing his best Bob from Twin Peaks in Marilyn Manson cosplay which is fine. But we never learn who he is, or where he came from or how he came to be the devil’s dollmaker in the first place. Ultimately, this film’s story as thin as a sheet of cheap toilet roll with unexplained plot points that go nowhere.

For example: How did the FBI track Nic’s character down at the bus stop? Well, that’s just one plot hole you’ll hopefully be drunk enough to ignore when you watch this film.

Don’t even get me started on the lead character, Special Agent Lee Harker. In what universe would a person who can’t make eye contact with anyone get through the rigorous training in Quantico?  No, putting her hair in a ponytail didn’t sell it for me. How did she break the coded letters? Well, she just did, okay? Why did the dollmaker like the band T-Rex? He just did. That’s what this movie is. A series of “She/he just dids.”

The more I think about it, the more this movie downright pisses me off.

There may come a time in the future when I feel bad for being so hard on it, but this is my first reaction.  Scarcely two hours post-credit roll and I’m furious that I bought into Longlegs’ excellent marketing campaign. They got my money. But they won’t get it again. I’d rather rewatch any of the films listed above instead.

I saw the first trailer for this movie and purposefully avoided any other reviews or spoilers, which was difficult, as this seems to be all that Film Twitter is talking about. The idea of the trailer — someone is turning children into people who their parents can’t recognize and need to kill — was intriguing.

So if you want to go into this like I did, spoiler free, stop reading now. I won’t be mad.

FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is able to find a suspect’s home without any other evidence. This leads to her being tested for psychic abilities and she’s able to divine the truth about half the time, which come to think of it, is a batting average that would get you into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Her superior officer,  Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) assigns her to his most puzzling case. A series of murder suicides have been happening for more than a decade. In each case, the father kills the wife and children and then kills himself. Family annihilators aren’t new. What is is that each crime scene has a letter in code from someone named Longlegs. This handwriting doesn’t match any victim yet there is no evidence that another person was ever in the home.

Each father also had a nine-year-old daughter born on the fourteenth of the month. The murders happened within six days before or after the birthday and form a sigil when laid out on a calendar with only one date missing to finish this occult shape.

The only survivor of Longlegs is Carrie Anne Camera (Kiernan Shipka) and she’s been in a mental home, silent for years. She recognizes Harker and gives her a clue to find her doll, which was an exact duplicate of her at nine along with a metal brain inside that the coroner claims had the voice of his ex-wife.

At this point, the FBI should realize that the killer — who has been sending letters to Harker and even broken into her home once, giving her the clues she needs to decode his language — knows too much about Harker, who already seems brittle and unable to deal with the case. They keep her on, even when they learn that her mother called the police about a man matching the look of Longlegs years ago and that Harker has a Polaroid of the man, which they use to soon arrest him.

Alright: I have to break from the narrative for a second and ask some questions.

Code and cyphers are cool. See Zodiac. See Se7en. See the real life Zodiac Killer.

However, the coded language in this movie is never really referred to again after Harker learns how to decode it. It never breaks anything in the case. It’s just cool.

Polaroids are cool, too. After years of pro wrestlers and strippers being the only ones to use them, they suddenly show up in a plenty of art and movies.

One Polaroid image of a man’s face is in no way enough evidence to find someone — they literally find Longlegs in seconds — much less enough physical evidence to keep him as long as they do.

And anyways, you should probably know that Longlegs is Nicholas Cage and his performance is wonderful but breaks the movie because other than the cinematography, nothing in it is as good as his over the top Tiny Tim in Blood Harvest acting. Then you wonder, why is the killer into T. Rex? Why does he make these dolls, which trust me, is the longest con ever. You have to get a creepy life-sized doll of a girl that looks exactly like her into the home and then have them play with it and then hope that she has a father, as well as being born on the ninth. It’s almost too much work until you get to the reveal.

Ah, the reveal.

Despite being a police procedural up until now, Longlegs has lived in Harker’s mother’s (Alicia Witt) basement and that he’s made her the accomplice, a nun who has never been mentioned in any of the police reports until the third act just lets you know that they make these metal-brained evil American Girl dolls with Satanic magic energy. I have to quote my friend Kris, who said, “Imagine if you watched all of Silence of the Lambs and you learn that Clarice’s mom used to bang it out with Hannibal Lecter.”

All of the metal brains seems Showtime Twin Peaks except that I expect that kind of thing from David Lynch and Twin Peaks is the epitome of horror police procedural and when it makes no sense at all, you demand that from it.

Now imagine investing time into a story and then you get a rug pull like this.

Anyways, in case you didn’t guess when you saw that Harker’s boss has a nine-year-old, you can see where this all ends up. You might think that one of the highest rated FBI agents in the country who has been working on a case for years about a man that kills girls age nine on the fourteenth of the month might have the deductive reasoning skills to figure that perhaps inviting an agent connected to his case is a bad idea, not to mention that maybe — just maybe — he and his family would be targeted.

Whoever did Neon’s marketing for this movie, creating the thebirthdaymurders.net website, the trailers, the 458-666-HELL phone number, the posters, it’s all great. Director Oz Perkins told IndieWire that NEON “really responded strongly to the movie, the raw materials of the movie really excited them, the way it looks, the way it feels, the way it sounds. They asked me early on, ‘Do we have your permission to kind of go nuts?’ And I said, ‘What else are we doing here? Go for it. Do your thing.””

The movie that they’re selling you is artifice. The outside of it looks so pretty, with long shots and takes that go on like a movie from another era, but then you’re reminded that it’s 2024 and most modern horror never sticks the landing. It’s not bad but isn’t it worse to believe that something could be great and it’s just average instead of figuring it’s average and not being disappointed?

For a movie that has been called the Silence of the Lambs for the 2020s, this has none of the actual story that backed up that film. The plot unravels as the holes become apparent with just a moment’s thought. As for the comparisons to Fincher, his iron grip of control and must be perfect realism wouldn’t have the 2007 version of The Price Is Right song play in a movie set in the 90s. Then again, Oregon rarely has lightning and thunder and that looks cool, so it’s in the movie.

I saw this at an Alamo Drafthouse and got trailers for Happy Birthday to Me and Brotherhood of Satan which put me in the headspace that I just might get a movie that I would like. But I’m just left with questions in this one and not the good kind of questions that intrigued me and wish I spent more time in the world of the film. I want things to be better and yes, yet again, I got caught up in the hype. You’d think I’d finally learn by now.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel, The Good, the Bad and the Verdict and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

Director Noriko Yuasa’s Japanese feature Performing Kaoru’s Funeral is an engaging look at laying  to rest someone who people only thought they knew. Lighthearted, poignant, and with both humorous and jaw-droppingly dramatic moments, the film examines the family members, work associates, and other acquaintances of the enigmatic title character (Kano Ichiki), a screenwriter whose life suddenly ended in an accident. 

Kaoru’s will stated that her ex-husband from 10 years earlier, unlucky actor Jun Yokotani (Koji Seki), be the chief mourner at her funeral in the rural village of Okayama, where she grew up. Unsure of what to do while there, he meets a group of people who were close to Kaoru, including her nine-year-old daughter (Chise Niitsu), who doesn’t know who her father is — and she isn’t the only one without that information.

As Performing Kaoru’s Funeral unfolds — with a screenplay by Takato Nishi — its characters and situations provide commentary on different Japanese societal topics including sexism, along with a wry comment on the inability for original films to be greenlighted in Japan. Yuasa paces the film nicely; it breezes along and unveils mysteries, bringing smiles and lumps to the throat in fine fashion, with a stellar ensemble cast, and gorgeous cinematography courtesy of Victor Catalá.

Performing Kaoru’s Funeral screens as part of Japan Cuts 2024, which runs July 10–21. For more information, visit https://japansociety.org/film/japancuts/.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel, The Good, the Bad and the Verdict and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

Director Kiyotaka Oshiyama’s anime feature Look Back is a coming-of-age tale that puts its two main characters and viewers alike through the emotional wringer. Fujino (voiced by Yumi Kawai) is a school girl whose manga in her elementary school’s newspaper draws a lot of praise from her fellow students — until it is suddenly overshadowed by the manga drawn by shut-in student Kyomoto (voiced by Mizuki Yoshida). Tasked by her middle school teacher to deliver a graduation document to Kyomoto, Fujino is surprised to learn that the girl is a fan of her work. The two work together as high schoolers and craft award-winning manga, splitting apart when Kyomoto announces that she wants to study art at university rather than continuing their success as a professional team. 

There’s much more to matters than what I have described here, and I don’t want to spoil what happens in this fast-paced, poignant feature, so suffice it to say that Look Back, based on the autobiographical manga Chainsaw Man by Tatsuki Fujimoto, delivers shocking tragedy, an alternate reality/”What if?” scenario, and plenty of smiles along with lumps in the throat as the bittersweet drama involving the two unlikely friends unfolds. The animation looks terrific, from scenes early on depicting Fujino’s comedy manga to emotionally heavy portrayals where facial expressions are wonderfully conveyed. The voice acting by the original Japanese cast is also top notch. Oshiyama has crafted a touching anime feature in Look Back that leaves plenty to mull over long after its final frame. 

Look Back screens as part of Japan Cuts 2024, which runs July 10–21. For more information, visit https://japansociety.org/film/japancuts/.