We’ve all seen the heist movie formula. You’ve got the methodical thief, the grizzled cop who doesn’t play by the rules and a labyrinth of L.A. freeways that might as well be a character themselves. Usually, these things play out exactly how you expect. But Crime 101? It feels like director Bart Layton (the guy who gave us The Imposter) decided to take Don Winslow’s novella and inject it with enough adrenaline to make the 405 look like a parking lot.

Is it a masterpiece? Probably not. Did it bomb at the box office, much to the confusion of anyone who likes seeing stars like Hemsworth and Ruffalo share a screen? Absolutely. But really, who cares about the opening weekend receipts other than the fatcats counting up the numbers? Movie lovers care about the grit, the sweat and the sheer audacity of a film that tries to be a classic crime thriller in a world that’s moved on to superheroes and sequels.

Chris Hemsworth plays Mike (or James, if we’re being formal), your classic one last job guy who lives by a code: no guns, no blood, no mess. Naturally, that all goes to hell the second he gets grazed by a bullet. He’s the professional to Ruffalo’s Lou Lubesnick, a detective who is essentially the human embodiment of a stale coffee cup and a bad divorce.

And then there’s Barry Keoghan as Ormon. Keoghan has been making a play for being the reigning king of playing absolute sociopathic weirdos. Here, he’s a biker who brings the kind of unpredictable, unhinged violence that turns a clean heist into a bloody mess. He’s the wrench in the gears, and frankly, he steals every scene he’s in.

The film’s strength is in its pacing. Layton keeps the wheels turning, weaving together the heist mechanics with the desperate lives of the people involved. Halle Berry’s Sharon is the brains of an insurance broker who’s sick of being overlooked. Watching her try to navigate the moral ambiguity of working with a criminal is a highlight.

Where it gets sticky—and maybe why the general public stayed away—is the tone. It’s not quite a high-octane actioner, and it’s not quite a gritty noir. It sits in that strange middle-ground space that fans of 70s crime cinema will love, but might leave the average popcorn-muncher scratching their head.

But for those same film fans, the legendary Nick Nolte pops up as the fence. Seeing him chewing the scenery in a supporting role is the kind of treat that makes a movie worth watching all by itself. And it’s always a joy to see Jennifer Jason Leigh in a film.

Crime 101 is a slick, stylish and ultimately melancholy look at guys who spend their lives trying to outrun their pasts on the concrete arteries of Southern California. It’s got a 1968 Camaro, a tense standoff at the Beverly Wilshire, and enough double-crosses to keep you guessing until the final frame.

Did it lose $17 million? Sure. But sometimes the biggest box office flops are the ones that deserve a second life on late-night cable or a dusty shelf in your collection. 

You can get this from Deep Discount.

Natalie (Kaiti Wallen) is a young woman who finally resurfaces after being missing for 15 years. She’s shell-shocked, struggling with PTSD and caught in the middle of a nightmare with two men claiming to be her father.

On one side, there’s Calvin (Jerry Hayes), the man she’s returned to. He’s an influential entrepreneur with a big house and a cold, detached aura. On the other side, there’s the man who held her captive for all those years, Bobby Nash (played by the director, Harley Wallen). Bobby is the one who fed her the story that Calvin is a monster and her true protector.

The movie isn’t about the kidnapping. It’s about the mental prison that lingers long after the chains are removed. Is Natalie finally safe, or has she just traded one cage for another?

Watching Fathers is like taking a ride down a back road at midnight. It’s dark, it’s twisty, and you aren’t entirely sure where you’re going to end up. Wallen doesn’t hold your hand; he throws you into the confusion alongside Natalie, using quick, jarring cuts that make you question the reliability of every single memory she has.

Kaiti Wallen does a heavy lift here. Portraying a character whose identity has been systematically dismantled is no easy task, and she captures that fragile, wide-eyed terror perfectly. Harley Wallen playing the kidnapper? It’s a bold move, and he makes Bobby disturbingly charismatic and relatable, which honestly makes the whole thing even harder to watch.

The only downside I have to share is that the ending feels somewhat abrupt, and some of the color balance seems to lean toward the blue side of the color wheel, making things look needlessly washed out. But other than that, for the budget, this movie makes a big swing toward telling a dark tale. It feels real, like something you’d watch on Dateline.

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.

Official synopsis: New York nightclub The Matador becomes the site of a high-profile murder that attracts the attention of an obsessive detective, a TV news reporter, and an elusive being living outside the realms of time and space. Their stories converge with that of a new-age cult operating at the command of an ultra-intelligent supercomputer named Bolero. 

Writer/director Jonathan Rosado plans to blow you away all the way back to the halcyon days of seventies and eighties underground cinema with his trippy feature Matador Bolero. Shot on Super 8, the film boasts a cornucopia of exploitation cinema elements and feels like something unearthed when a modern excavation under a former 42nd Street grindhouse theater discovered it in a well-preserved film canister.  

Yes, everything described in the official synopsis takes place in one manner or another, but nothing is as simple or as crystal clear as that synopsis seems to promise. Matador Bolero feels more like a series of vignettes ranging from plot elements to topless peep show performances to blasts of psychotropic visual patterns to . . . well, we don’t want to give everything away. You’ll see, if you choose to take the ride. And you should.

The performances range from head-scratching to good but the cast members are all-in throughout. The three most recognizable names are genre stalwart Kansas Bowling, Jack Irv, and musician Yves Tumor. The Suede Hello provides an excellent score that is heavy on synthesizers and distorted electric guitar. 

Matador Bolero is not for everyone. For some it will be exactly the kind of unusual fare that they seek. For others, it may feel like an endurance test. Adventurous viewers seeking an offbeat slice of weirdness crafted by a filmmaker who made exactly the film he envisioned will want to check this one out. 

Matador Bolero opens in New York on May 22 and Los Angeles on June 11, 2026 with a national expansion to follow.

The transition from the narrative focus of 2021’s Mortal Kombat to its sequel is nothing short of a franchise fatality performed on its own setup. By disposing of Cole Young — the original audience surrogate — so ruthlessly at the hands of Martyn Ford’s towering Shao Kahn, the film effectively signals that the training wheels are off. It’s a bold, albeit polarizing, subversion of expectations: killing the protagonist within the first act is a classic Poochie-died-on-the-way-to-his-home-planet move, but here it serves as a visceral promise that no one is safe.

Directed by Simon McQuoid and written by Jeremy Slater, this time the movie has course corrected to have the hero be Johnny Cage (Karl Urban), a washed-up martial arts actor recruited by the thunder god Raiden (Tadanobu Asano) to join a series of fighters for Earth, including Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee), a reborn and reformed Kano (Josh Lawson), Liu Kang (Ludi Lin) and Jax (Mehcad Brooks) against the forces of Shao Khan’s Outworld army, which has Edenian princess Kitana (Adeline Rudolph), her mother Queen Sindel (Ana Thu Nguyen), a reborn Kung Kao (Max Huang) and Jade (Tati Gabrielle).

Yes, it turns out that Earth is about to lose to Outworld. Plus, Shao Khan hedges his bets with the aid of sorcerer Quan Chi (Damon Herriman) and Shang Tsung (Chin Han), who have sliced Raiden’s throat and taken his power to give Shao Khan immortal power. 

Somewhere in the middle of all this, Hanzo Hasashi/Scorpion (Hiroyuki Sanada) has learned how to transform Hell into his own paradise, getting past his anger at Bi-Han/Sub-Zero (Joe Taslim), until he learns that he’s still kind of alive and has also split into a second fighter, Noob Saibot. Then there’s Baraka (CJ Bloomfield) and the Tarkatans, who are the only ones who can get into the castle.

If you played the games — and yes, I have and still do — you’re going to find so much to love, like actual energy bars showing up at one point and a devotion to gory fatalities. I mean, Ed Boon shows up twice, once as a bartender, and his voice says Scorpion’s “Get over here!” It’s fan service, but why else would they make this movie?

That makes it kind of hard to rate. If you’re someone just walking in, I guess there’s entertainment here, particularly if you like martial arts movies. If you’re someone who knows how to pull off an animality or a friendship, you’re probably going to like it way better than the last one. Then again, nothing has ever been better than the original, but such is life. Or death, in the case of Mortal Kombat.

TL: DR Johnny Cage was awesome, a human brain pops out and lots of fingers get sliced off. I cheered. Here’s to Nightwolf and Stryker being in the next one.

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.

Official synopsis: Reed’s monotonous days lead to a meltdown at his dead-end job. He bails and heads to his parents’ place in Arizona, spending his days floating in the pool while his parents persuade him to get back on track. Reed comes up with a wild plan instead. He hires an escort, Tess, to take care of him for a week. Debauchery and buffoonery ensue as Tess joins Reed on his journey to nowhere fast.

Darkly comic character studies of socially awkward characters exhibiting troubling psychological issues are becoming a subgenre unto themselves lately. Director Oliver Bernsen’s Bagworm looked like it might be the most uncomfortable of that type of film to premiere this spring, but writer/director/star Nick Funess’s The Hedonist says “Hold my drugs from my parents’ medicine cabinet.”

You know you are in for a wild ride when a film’s opening scenes include a close-up of STD warts being frozen off of a man’s genitals. Hang on tightly because Funess, who portrays the decidedly strange Reed, has much more in store, including some of the deliberately least erotic sex scenes you’re likely to see in a 2026 film. 

Just before his rich, enabling parents (Richard Funess as Dad and Marijane Funess as Mom) go on a vacation, Reed introduces them to Tess (Izzi Rojas), who he says is his new girlfriend but is really a sex worker who he has hired to “take care of” him for the week. The foursome’s initial dinner meeting is enough to put viewers ill at ease, but a later dinner scene with Reed, Tess, and two other people makes the initial one look somewhat close to normal. There’s also a third act scene that quickly takes the film into unexpected places.

Nick Funess won the Best Director award at MidWest WeirdFest for The Hedonist. His commitment to seeing his vision through is all there on the screen. The performances are sometimes nearly emotionless but that conveys the miasma of being and near-nothingness through which these major characters trudge. Nick Funess and Rojas give strong performances as they head up a good ensemble cast. 

The Hedonist characters try fleeting attempts at happiness and go through long bouts of joylessness, and there is plenty of merely going through the motions. For viewers, jaw dropping oddness and head scratching enigmas are on full display. You may wonder what you got yourself into but you won’t be able to look away.

The Hedonist screened at the 10th annual MidWest WeirdFest, which took place March 5–8, 2026 at the Micon Downtown Cinema in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

The director of Guerilla Metropolitana either has a massive PR budget or a tireless obsession with messaging me directly to watch his film. After receiving a long, intense audio message from him, I felt I had no choice.

Here’s an example of an audio message I got from him: “I’ll tell you from the beginning. It’s not an easy watch at all. It’s not even horror. It’s horrific, but it’s not horror. It’s quite pornographic, although it’s not porn, but it’s quite pornographic. It’s very extreme, very sadistic.

It is almost plotless. It’s got a very basic plot. The film is highly experimental. It puts the theme of artistic freedom at the center. How far can a filmmaker go in the name of artistic freedom? Voyeurism topics like that are in place. The complete rejection of morality in exchange for enlightenment.

Some have called the film a visionary work of art. Others have called the film an offensive, repugnant piece of film. So nothing in between.”

How could I say no after that message?

After the cult success of Dariuss, director Guerrilla Metropolitana was hired by a dying woman with a fake name, Elektra McBride, who has a powerful televangelist husband. She only has one demand: to appear in the film via video link. A seemingly virtuous charity worker, Juicy X, becomes the face of the film and the twisted desires of its unseen patron, as well as her director.

Then, with no set narrative, the Mystery Woman is abused sexually until a gun is produced and we finally watch a cleaner (Marie Antoinette de Robespierre) disinfect the scene.

In a world that has produced cinema like Salo, Sweet Movie, the films of Joe D’Amato and Jess Franco, not to mention Last House On Dead End Street, Forced Entry, Waterpower, Armand Weston’s The Taking of Christina and The Defiance of Good, as well as any number of films by Japanese creatives like Sade Satô, Hideshi Hino, Daisuke Yamanouchi or Hisayasu Satô:, I wonder how shocked anybody can be any more.

What works here isn’t the movie as much as the psychodrama created around it. I miss ballyhoo and selling movies; Metropolitana has gone all out to get people to watch this, often on what seems like a one-on-one basis. That’s commitment. What he made feels like a test for the audience to get through or perhaps one where the viewer reflects on all the things their eyes have seen.

For all the talk toward how shocking this is — and I hate comparing movies to other movies, but here I go — this didn’t destroy me like Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible, which puts the viewer through hell thanks to its unblinking eye as we watch people be ruined and yet still retain a storytelling arc, much less one in reverse. It feels closer to the Nick Zedd Cinema of Transgression era, perhaps without the eye of a Richard Kern.

Often, films like this — I’m looking at you, A Serbian Film — cloak their transgressive nature in a square-up reel explanation that they’re making a political statement or commenting on how the world treats people. Yet they want to have their cake and fuck it repeatedly while you watch, too, and then kill said cake.

I want to understand what Metropolitana wants from this and what he’s trying to say. At the very least, you have to give it to him to not only go full frontal nude on camera, but to wear a t-shirt of his last film while doing so.

As they say, always be selling.

You can watch this for yourself on Fawesome.

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

Full disclosure: I LOVE films where animals attack. The notion of a chimp in a sweater with an ipad who goes on a murderous rampage/ piqued my interest immediate. 

I was pleasantly surprised that a movie like this was made and released in the modern era.  

Primate offers viewers a well-executed simple premise. Cujo with a chimp. That’s pretty much it. The characters are secondary to the action. Forget that there’s no rabies in Hawaii, where the film takes place. It doesn’t matter. It’s enough to know that a mongoose got into poor Ben’s enclosure and bit him. The “whys” and “hows” aren’t important when fighting off a rabid ape with the strength of 3 Chuck Norrises. 

Most impressive are the film’s practical effects. That’s not a CGI chimp. It’s an actor in a full body suit. The kills are insanely creative, bringing to the screen what happened in real life when a chimp named Travis went rogue and ripped off Charla Nash’s jaw with his bare hands because he didn’t like her new hairstyle or her new Tickle Me Elmo Doll. Lest we forget Buddy and Ollie, who attacked a couple when they brought a birthday cake for their own chimp, Moe who shared space with Buddy and Ollie in an animal sanctuary in California. No cake? No face. Those are the rules. 

This movie takes what we, the audience, have read about in the news and pictured in our minds for decades and renders it in silicone and spirit gum glory. Although the film feels a bit slow at times, the scenes where Ben the sign-language chimp intimidates his victims made me genuinely uncomfortable. If you’ve ever stared into the eyes of a chimp up close with no bars in between you, as I have, you’ll know what I mean. They look through you. I once saw one sitting in a makeup chair getting his hair done for a TV show. He looked at me as I passed by his dressing room as if to say, “Where’s my skinny oat latte, Bitch?” Later, that same chimp got into the passenger seat of an Audi in the parking lot and put on his own seatbelt. They are us. They are remarkable and marvelous creatures capable of great acts of violence. Add rabies to the mix and an isolated location with an infinity pool, a bunch of young people and a deaf best-selling author dad and you’ve got a decent movie. I loved Ben. None of it was his fault. A sympathetic monster, to be sure. 

Are there other horror tropes we’ve seen a million times before? Yes. But the reason horror tropes exist is because they work. The direction is solid and the overall production design of the house reminded me a bit of the super-modern architecture in Tenebrae even if the lighting is a bit dark. 

Speaking of Argento…the kill scene where the girl buys it in the SUV was shot and scored just like an Argento film. Other musical cues sounded reminiscent of Escape From New York. In another scene, a guy lands on his head at the bottom of a cliff. There are plenty of, “Ohhhh” moments for the gorehounds to latch onto. 

I wish Ben had endured a more spectacular demise at the end of the film, but overall, I enjoyed it. If Primate had come out in the ‘80s, I would have watched it a million times along with Monkey Shines and Phenomena. Inga is still my favorite chimp in a horror movie. MONKEY JUSTICE!!!!

The Paramount Blu-ray release has a commentary track from director/writer Johannes Roberts and producer Walter Hamada and features of the making of the movie. You can order it from Deep Discount.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A.C. Nicholas, legendary exploitation-film historian, rapscallion, and frequent contributor to this site, attended the 2026 South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas. He gives us the inside scoop on some upcoming films.

Just before I hopped on the plane to Austin and SXSW, I was thinking that the current state of movie comedy is pathetic. In the 70s and 80s, we had films from Monty Python, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray, John Belushi, John Hughes, the ZAZ guys, hell, Rudy Ray Moore’s Dolemite was hilarious. Today, it’s dire. Comedies are money losers in theaters, and the stuff made for streaming services is either a sad-ass romcom or a belated sequel that no one asked for to something like Beverly Hills Cop. A couple of months ago, I watched Frackham Hall, a parody of Downton Abbey, which was moderately amusing. But before that, I can’t remember a decent comedy, which is why I walked into Pizza Movie at SXSW with the lowest of expectations. But my head was about to explode—like the 50 or so in the film.

At the outset, the generic title Pizza Movie recalls 80s teen comedies like Hot Dog … The Movie and Hamburger: The Motion Picture. And if you figured that there will be a meta-reference why the film has that generic title, well done. This might be the review for you. Anyway, I knew next to nothing about the film other than it was the first film from Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher, two former SNL and Funny or Die writers and starred Gatan Matarazzo. An SNL-adjacent movie with a kid from Stranger Things? That hardly sounded promising.

But hang on tight, the first five minutes have more laughs than probably the last 10 comedies I’ve seen (if only I could remember what they were apart from Frackham Hall). In a brilliant montage, winningly set to David Naughton’s disco hit “Makin’ It,” we see that the misguidedly overconfident Matarazzo as Jack and his college roommate, Sean Giambrone (the TV show The Goldbergs) as Montgomery, who’s so wussy he has a pet butterfly, are the geekiest kids on campus and hated by everyone for a mysterious thing that happened with the football team. We follow them as they get beaten up, abused, shaken down, farted on, and covered in urine. If the movie had no laughs past that opening, it would still be better than all the recent comedies combined.

Soon, it’s apparent that this movie’s universe is an extreme version of a Savage Steve Holland film, like his classic Better Off Dead: surreal, weird, and batshit crazy. One day, the cool kids in school have the hapless duo on their dorm room floor and are farting in their faces–and potentially giving them pink eye. (The clique leader, a smarmy kid in a sweater, never seems to have any conversation outside of “we farted in their faces.”) These hijinks dislodge a secreted and long-forgotten tin that contains what appear to be drugs. What are these smart lads to do but use Google and check out “drugs exploding head mints.” And lo and behold, up pops a 10-year-old YouTube video of Sarah Sherman (this movie gets more amazing by the minute), a chemistry major who created this mind-blowing psychedelic. Taking one mint will give you seven levels of tripping. (Now we’re into Cheech and Chong, Harold and Kumar, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World territory.) I’ll let you fully discover the trip levels yourself, but I will preview that one deals with exploding heads, and the last one has your worst nightmare f***ing you in the ass with a chainsaw. (One character will discover how terrible that is simply because he was frightened by the Rat King in a Baltimore community theater production of the Nutcracker as a child.) 

Now, if the film were only about the misfits making it through the seven levels—all filled with ridiculous, surreal, violent, gory, disgusting, absolutely stupid and psychotic imagery, including heads on hands and a nightmarish area where a Hispanic man holds a baby in a sailor suit, and you have to “impress the baby,” it would be great. But oh no, it’s more, much more. If the trips get out of control, Sherman tells them the only way to come down is to eat pizza. So the guys, high AF, order pizza, which is delivered by a psychotic drone delivery cart voiced by Bobby Moynihan. All they need to do is compose themselves long enough to go down two floors to the dorm lobby to pick up the pizza.

But that, my friends, is an epic journey like the Odyssey fraught with incredible danger, such as a stormtrooper brigade of resident assistants whose leader is psychotically committed to punishing rulebreakers by taking their cellphones and using them to register their owners to living at Gralk Hall, a dorm on a branch campus four hours away, which appears to be part hell, part tuberculosis sanitarium, and part insane asylum from which no one ever returns. But assisting Jack and Montgomery on this journey is former platonic friend Lizzy, played by Lulu Wilson (Becky and The Wrath of Becky), who’s now part of the cool kids because she has a credit card, and who also has ingested a mint and is tripping balls.

I’ll stop right there because I’m laughing too hard, there’s so much more to tell that I’d be here for hours typing, and you need to discover for yourself the twisted, sick, juvenile, puerile, revolting, ludicrous, politically incorrect hilarity in this effed up film. Like Airplane, it’s packed with so many jokes that if one misses, no worries. Just three seconds later, you’ll be doubled over in hysterics. Indeed, someone should count the number of jokes in just over 90 minutes. I’ll bet it’s a record.

That said, like all comedies, Pizza Movie will be divisive. Many will not find it funny and complain that it’s terrible. If that’s you, I don’t want to know you. If the humor hits with you, you’re in for a rollicking time, just like back in the halcyon days of movie comedies. Loaded with great video effects, characters, and humor, it’s a big winner. And it was filmed in Buffalo. Amazing!

Pizza Movie premieres on Hulu on April 3.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A.C. Nicholas, legendary exploitation-film historian, rapscallion, and frequent contributor to this site, attended the 2026 South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas. He gives us the inside scoop on some upcoming films.

FINAL EXAMINATION—Horror Filmmaking 101

Create a horror feature film using as many types of jump scares as possible. Additional points given for homages to classic horror films with jump scares. Use your imagination and be creative. (Counts for 100% of your grade for the semester)

March 16, 2026

Professor,

As my submission for the final exam, attached is a digital file of my film Hokum, with Adam Scott trapped in an Irish haunted hotel. I hope you like it.

Respectfully submitted,

Damian McCarthy

A mysterious teaser trailer was attached to Oz Perkins’s horror film Keeper last fall. While Keeper was another misfire for the prolific Perkins, the coming attraction was for one of the most anticipated horror films at SXSW 2026, Hokum, writer-director Damian McCarthy’s follow-up to his hit Oddity (2024). While quite a few folks loved Hokum at the SXSW screenings (the young woman sitting next to me watched most of the movie through her hands), it was one of the most infuriating horror movies I’ve seen in years. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Hokum begins with a perplexing scene of a man in armor and a young boy in a desert. They have a treasure map that they can’t get out of a bottle. The scene ends with a cliffhanger, and we soon learn that it’s the beginning of the epilogue of what will be the last book in author Ohm Bauman’s best-selling conquistador trilogy. Yours truly, ever the avid credits reader, sighed and noted that in the opening credits, an Abu Dhabi production company was credited, so this is McCarthy’s sucking up to his foreign investors. We’re not off to a good start.

Adam Scott as Bauman sits in the dark in his sterile, concrete residence with his laptop, drinking whiskey and laboring over how to end his book. He has writer’s block. He also has a small box that contains a revolver and some faded old photographs. Hold the phone. There was a sudden movement of something in the dark, our first jump scare. 

The next thing we know, Scott’s in Ireland to write that damn epilogue and put the ashes of his parents under a big tree where they got engaged. In rather rapid succession, he sees a local with a dead goat in the parking lot of the quaint old hotel. He insults the local. He checks into the hotel. He insults the desk clerk. He insults an old guy in a wheelchair, who is telling a folk story about a witch to some children. The old guy owns the hotel, but Scott doesn’t care. He insults the bellhop who’s a wannabe writer. He then pounds down whiskey, finds out about the honeymoon suite that’s haunted by a witch, so it must remain locked, and only mildly insults the cute young Irish woman tending bar.

This sets up two huge problems with the film: First, Scott’s an insufferable douchebag. He’s so awful that he can’t really be a surrogate or a hero for the viewer, You can’t picture yourself in his shoes, and you don’t really care what happens to him. Then there’s an unexpected shock behind his hotel room door, and McCarthy begins the mystery part of the narrative to set up the supernatural part, the movie’s second big problem. The young woman mysteriously disappears, Scott feels compelled to help find her, and the supernatural stuff sets in, which means the film will soon become a jump-scare-o-matic. Oh, I forgot to mention that when he buried those ashes, he met an old coot living out of his van in the woods who drinks milk laced with the local magic mushrooms that the goats have been eating. If you’re getting the idea that this film is overstuffed with random tropes and things that will probably end up going nowhere, ding, ding, ding, you are correct.

This mystery of the missing barmaid really cripples the film because McCarthy must interrupt the supernatural stuff to get back to Scott’s playing detective with the old coot from the woods. At this point, I thought to myself, why in the hell did we need all that set up? Just get Scott locked in the haunted honeymoon suite already. 

In the supernatural part of the movie, Scott eventually does get locked in that suite, and we have jump scares galore. I didn’t count them, but, like clockwork, there’s at least one about every 10 minutes. And McCarthy, like he’s fulfilling the requirements of the imaginary film school final exam that began this review, does almost every possible permutation of a jump scare. He gives you the motionless apparition at the end of the hallway, the out-of-focus image suddenly coming into focus outside a window, a spirit suddenly moving across the screen in the background, and a character shifting position to reveal a ghost. That fulfills the homage part of the exam by cribbing from The Shining, Suspiria, The Exorcist III, and Insidious.

But wait, there’s more! A scary thing comes out of the TV as in Poltergeist and The Ring. And The Ring was so cool, hey, let’s pay more homage to it by turning its well into the hotel’s dumbwaiter shaft. I think McCarthy plays all variations on his theme except the cat jump scare and the old chestnut with closing the medicine-cabinet mirror.

At about midpoint, I started to grade the film like an academic exercise because that’s how it felt to me: a semester-long project to see how many times you   can go “Boo!” To its credit, the production is beautiful looking, the visual effects are good, Scott gives it everything he has, and it’s never boring. About half of the attempted jump scares work well, and a couple are almost in the pantheon of the ne plus ultra, the jump scare at the end of Brian DePalma’s Carrie. But the other half don’t work due to poor timing or misdirection or a musical stinger that comes a fraction of a second too soon. 

Even as time is running out in the last act, McCarthy’s not quite finished. Look at this! It’s Inferno! Now I’m going to crib from Fulci without the gore! It’s The Fog! If you’ve been following me, it should be obvious now why the film infuriated me so much. McCarthy’s a talented horror director, for sure, but he’s just punching in all these mechanical shocks, tropes, and references that mostly go nowhere. And speaking of nowhere, we’re going back to that imaginary desert in Adam Scott’s mind for a bookend scene with the conquistador and the boy. But not before McCarthy has a last line of dialogue that pulls the rug out from under the viewer. No, it’s not “it was all a dream,” but it’s pretty damn close. 

When Hokum comes out in wide release from Neon on May 1, a lot of folks are going to rave and say that it’s effing great and scary AF. But the SXSW crowd at my screening didn’t applaud when it was over. It was the only time that happened at a screening while I was in Austin. That’s dire. Maybe other audience members felt, as I did, that McCarthy had just repeatedly punched them in the face and laughed for over an hour and a half, and that didn’t deserve applause. To paraphrase Monty Python, “I came for a horror film, not abuse.” 

Mr. McCarthy, you passed the final, but just barely. You are a smart and talented guy. Next semester, you’d better show improvement, or you’ll have to do remedial work by directing episodes of Goosebumps.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A.C. Nicholas, legendary exploitation-film historian, rapscallion, and frequent contributor to this site, attended the 2026 South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas. He gives us the inside scoop on some upcoming films.

Family Movie, a meta-horror film starring the beloved Kevin Bacon (Friday the 13th, Tremors, Hollow Man, Stir of Echoes, MaXXXine, and many more), wife Kyra Sedgwick (the long-running TV show The Closer), musician son Travis, and daughter Sosie (the TV show Scream and the film Smile) is a strange creation that resides in a murky nether world somewhere between vanity project and high-concept gimmick. In it, the Bacon family members play exaggerated versions of themselves as a family that makes micro-budget horror films.

Kevin plays Jack Smith, a farmer and struggling filmmaker, whose greatest triumph was when one of his Palonia Brothers-like films opened a crappy regional film festival two decades earlier. He’s trying to finish Blood Moon, the last horror film he’s going to make with his family. (You gotta love the inside references to the horror masterpiece Messiah of Evil in Dan Beers’s screenplay, including the climax of Jack’s film, which is something akin to the never-filmed sacrifice scene from Messiah.) Kyra plays his wife, a failed New York stage actress, who stars in the family’s films and does craft services–humus and stuff that will “bloat” a bit player. Travis is their boom-operator son, a heavy-metal head into martial arts who longs for something more in life. And Sosie is their daughter, of course, a budding actress who has just landed a starring role in a TV series filming in Vancouver, but who is afraid to tell her mom that mom’s former agent, now an enemy, got her the job. It’s just your average family with average problems.

But, as you can guess, things do not go smoothly on Blood Moon. A documentary filmmaker hired by Jack to do a “making of” film keeps catching the family at its worst, a surly neighbor, played by a very funny John Carroll Lynch (Face/Off, Gothika, and Zodiac), has a dog that keeps barking and ruining takes, and wonderful character actor Jackie Earle Haley (Dollman, Maniac Cop III: Badge of Silence, and the remake of Nightmare on Elm Street), playing a Smith-film regular, gets conked on the head with a spotlight. And as his SAG insurance has just expired, he hands Jack the hospital bill, which is huge because the wound reopened and oozed and all that. Then there’s a real murder and we’re off to even broader humor, more murders, lots of gore, family meetings where secrets are revealed, and proof that the family that slays together stays together. 

Sounds like fun, right? Well, for a time it is kind of  fun. The Bacons seem like nice people whom you’d want to hang out with, and they’re clearly having a ball, especially Kyra. But I think my plot synopsis makes Family Movie sound much better than it really is. It’s co-directed by Kevin and Kyra in a slick, fussy way (too many unnecessary tracking shots) that the fictional Bacon clan could have only dreamed of achieving. I hate to use the cliché, but it’s never truer than here: They’re all having more fun than the viewer with this burlesque horror-comedy, which isn’t bad, but it isn’t great either. I’d describe it as kind of the American horror version of an Ealing Studios black comedy like Kind Hearts and Cornets as done by Benny Hill with assistance from the Cohen Brothers, while drunk on Malort. (But if that were true, it would be a much better movie.) It’s cute and pleasant enough, but obvious and predictable, and I’m sure I won’t think about it again after finishing this review. 

Fun fact: A producer friend of mine was invited to the pre-screening party for Family Movie. He told me Kevin Bacon didn’t attend his own party but was seen later looking surly, accompanied by his gigantic bodyguard. Somebody must’ve mentioned Footloose to Bacon, and the bodyguard had to throw the miscreant through a wall. Now that image is better and funnier than anything in Family Movie.

Family Movie has apparently been picked up by Neon but does not have a release date.