Come True (2020)

The movie theater I usually go to is a small mom-and-pop theater at the end of a strip mall in a rural part of Kentucky. Due to its small size, being in the middle of nowhere, and not being part of a big chain like AMC, Regal, or Cinemark, they don't show a lot of foreign movies or movies from smaller distributors. But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and what theaters remaining open struggled to keep their lights on, that small theater spent several months showing both older releases and low-budget indie movies alongside the handful of new movies the big studios were able to release and send them. Thanks to that, I got to see Jaws for the very first time, along with Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, and the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead, on the big screen.

Among the indie movies they showed was Come True, which ran at what film festivals it could during the second half of 2020 before playing in a mere 96 theaters in the United States in the spring of 2021. I saw it at that theater, probably the only person that saw it the whole time they had it, and thought it was absolutely fantastic. But I haven't seen it since then, so I decided to come back and check it out to see if what I thought now lines up with what I thought then. Almost five years after the fact, I feel confident saying that while Come True is not a perfect movie, it kept me glued to the screen wondering just where the story would take me.

Trying to avoid her mother has made eighteen-year-old Sarah Dunn (Julia Sarah Stone) essentially homeless. She spends her nights in the local park or on her friends' couches, only returning to her mother's house when nobody else is home to change her clothes and steal food. This also has a negative effect on Sarah's sleep routine, struggling to stay awake during the day and plagued by horrible nightmares when she does sleep. Her nightmares are the same every night: she's stuck in an increasingly bizarre maze that leads to a shadowy figure with glowing eyes.

Needing money and becoming more unnerved by her nightmares, Sarah applies to be a test subject in a sleep study, the purpose of which is not revealed to her or any of the other applicants. Her nightmares eventually worsen after a few nights, and she panics when she's shown a picture the figure amongst the data the scientists running the study have compiled. One of these scientists, an odd one nicknamed Riff (Landon Liboiron), finally relents and tells her the truth: the clinic is testing new equipment that can map dreams and turn mental images into pictures.

Though she's angry about it, Sarah agrees to continue the study, but she doesn't stay for long. The next night sees everyone that's part of the study dream about that same figure, some having very much worse experiences than others. Sarah flees the clinic, unsure of where to go, what to do, or how much danger she may or may not be in.

Come True wasn't quite as good as I remembered it being in 2021. That said, I still liked it a lot. It's a captivating ride, and at the very least, it's an interesting entry into the world of low-budget indie horror and science fiction. It's got scares, but they're actually few and far between. Instead, the movie tries its best to make the viewer uncomfortable. It wants you to, much like its characters, feel like you just woke up from a bad dream. That's actually what I liked the most about it. That uneasy feeling made Come True stand out from a lot of the horror movies I've seen over the last few years.

Holding the movie's reigns is Anthony Scott Burns. He wore many hats during production, being credited as the director, writer, cinematographer, and editor, and under the "Pilotpriest" moniker he uses for his musical career, composed the movie's score in tandem with the Canadian synthpop duo Electric Youth. With all these tools at his disposal, Burns crafts a movie that may be deeper than I can personally understand. I've been told that the writings of Carl Jung were an influence here, but I barely know who he is at all, so that's all way beyond my understanding. That said, Come True is beautifully made. Much of the movie is bathed in a pale turquoise with the occasional small splash of pale pink, making the contrast between it and Burns' heavy use of shadows and darkness feel haunting.

The cinematography is beautiful, and combined with a musical score reminiscent of work by John Carpenter, it makes what we see feel very ethereal and appropriately dreamlike in a way where it's simultaneously peaceful and not quite right. And that "not quite right" feeling becomes important as the movie progresses, because as it approaches the end, things feel more and more wrong. The lighting is darker, the atmosphere more uncomfortable in a way that works in the movie's favor.

The script also keeps much of what's happening a mystery. We're never really sure why anything is the way it is. Elements feel like they're dropped, new things are introduced out of seemingly nowhere, and the movie's bizarre twist ending doesn't help matters either. Like I alluded to earlier, I'd probably understand it more if I knew more (or honestly, literally anything) about Jungian theories. But even though I don't, it makes Come True more effective. It's like actually being in a dream, where nothing makes sense like it should, and sometimes you wake up unsatisfied or bothered by the story your brain was telling you. And sometimes you just plain can't make heads or tails of it.

The small cast also does a fine job contributing to the movie, but they're all carried by Julia Sarah Stone. You want to reach into the movie and give her character hug and tell her that everything will be fine. Stone plays Sarah as someone whose whole life is an absolute wreck, one that worsens as the sleep study continues. The utter desperation and fear her character must be feeling is on full display every second she's on the screen.

All told, Come True isn't a movie for everyone. And while there are things I'd have liked to seen from it and was disappointed with, I also understand why they were done that way. It's still a good movie that is worth seeing, especially if you like your movies to be more on the unusual or disorienting side. Come True has a lot of ambition, and I imagine would be an exorcise in "lo-fi" genre filmmaking that intellectuals would eat up. Even a non-intellectual like me found a lot of positives in it. Give it a shot because you never know, Come True could be the movie of your dreams.

(I won't apologize for that bad joke.)

Final Rating: ***

Willy's Wonderland (2021)

In my review of Five Nights at Freddy's, I mentioned that "mascot horror" almost always stays within the realm of independent video games. That's where the majority of its popularity stems from, after all. But it's occasionally branched out into movies too. For example, The Banana Splits Movie found a small fanbase thanks to the sheer absurdity of a Hanna-Barbara kids' show from the '60s being adapted into a modern slasher movie, while also predating that recent and unfortunate trend of beloved children's characters from the past being reimagined as modern horror villains. There's also the movie I wanted to talk about right now, Willy's Wonderland.

Though the creative team behind it may or may not actually admit it, it's hard to deny that Willy's Wonderland began as an obvious ripoff of Five Nights at Freddy's. A cursory glance at their most basic concepts makes the similarities painfully obvious; Willy's Wonderland is roughly the same idea without several years' worth of lore. But unlike the the poorly made, microbudget ripoffs and cash-grabs that you expect when something that fits into the "mockbuster" label, Willy's Wonderland is one that is an absolute blast from beginning to end.

It does more than badly imitate a more well-known property's ideas, it does more than take the basic "someone is trapped in a Chuck E. Cheese knockoff with a bunch of killer animatronics" idea and make something with no heart or soul. Willy's Wonderland completely embraces the inherent B-movie insanity of the whole thing to create something I found to be utterly captivating, and I cannot say enough good things about it.

The movie focuses on a silent, anonymous drifter (Nicolas Cage) who finds himself stranded on the outskirts of a small town in the middle of nowhere after a spike strip left in the road takes out all four of his car's tires. The super-sketchy local mechanic only takes cash and there are no working ATMs for miles, so a deal is struck: a sleazy local businessman will cover the repair bills if the drifter spends the night doing janitorial duty at an abandoned children's entertainment center called "Willy's Wonderland."

Sounds simple enough, right? That's where you're wrong. Just when Willy's Wonderland's new janitor begins what sounds like a mundane new job for just a night, he discovers the restaurant's eight withered animatronic mascots are alive, possessed by the spirits of a satanic cult and determined to kill anyone who walks inside. But the janitor won't let that, nor the dispensable group of teenagers that break in at some point during the movie, stand in his way as he cleans up the place as he'd been hired to do.

I first saw Willy's Wonderland not long after it was released back in 2021 and immediately fell in love. Not one single frame of the movie's entire 89-minute runtime is meant to be taken seriously. It is a batshit insane combination of every silly cheap slasher movie trope and cliché played fast and loose. I honestly don't know if I can convey just how utterly bonkers Willy's Wonderland is.

Director Kevin Lewis and writer G.O. Parsons treat the movie as if it were something made by Sam Raimi if he got his start now instead of 1981. There's a paltry budget and a cast and script that might not be all that great, but there's also an energy there that can and will keep people engaged with what's on the screen. There are parts that are sluggish, but I found myself willing to overlook those moments because the rest of the movie made up for it.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to spend the rest of this review gushing about Nicolas Cage and his performance as the silent badass credited solely as "the janitor." He is the biggest reason why this movie is so much fun. You absolutely will not give a shit about any other actor or character in this movie. I said before that the characters are disposable, and that is 100% true. They're solely there to be numbers for an episode of Dead Meat's "Kill Count" videos on YouTube, they're caricatures of characters you'd see in some cheap slasher movie with the actors giving performances that match. All that's asked of them is to deliver stilted dialogue and do stupid things that you've seen in a hundred other horror movies. And let's face it, you're not gonna remember or even care about the locals that are in on the whole thing or the idiot teenagers that have shown up to burn the place down, but split up to have sex and smoke weed despite knowing the place is a death trap. You're here for Nicolas Cage.

The janitor almost doesn't belong here, with Cage himself saying in an interview on the Blu-ray's special features that it was a "Pale Rider meets Killer Klowns from Outer Space" situation. That's a fun way to describe it, because it feels like the janitor escaped from an action movie or a Western and somehow ended up in a cheesy slasher movie. It's like if someone dropped the Doom Slayer into one of those post-Scream horror flicks from around the turn of the millennium, only if the Doom Slayer were a little bit more kooky.

Much like the Doom Slayer (and "Doomguy" before him), the janitor doesn't speak one word of dialogue throughout the entirety of the movie. We only ever hear Cage's voice through the occasional grunt while he fights the merry band of monsters. A quiet hero is nothing new, his silence would make him just as menacing as the villains if this were any other movie. But this isn't any other movie. It loops around and becomes hilarious because he never responds to any character beyond a simple nod, if he even gives them that.

Dialogue, much like a backstory or even a name, would just get in his way. His sole focus is doing his job as a janitor. When one of the teenagers tries talking him into leaving, giving the janitor (and the audience) the backstory of the place, he seems like he's outright ignoring her. He doesn't respond, he doesn't look at her, he doesn't even acknowledge that she's speaking. The janitor just goes on about his business.

It's as if he's taking the janitor job so seriously that even fighting the monsters is as much a part of his duties as mopping the floors and washing the windows, and everyone else there is slowing him down. He cleans up the messes left by every fight and throws what's left of the animatronics out with the trash, makes sure his uniform is tidy, and occasionally stops by the break room to have a drink of soda and play a round of pinball. And he takes his regularly scheduled breaks seriously, going as far as to drop what he's doing and take them as a fight is about to begin, returning once his time is up so the fight can commence.

In the that interview on the Blu-ray I mentioned earlier, Cage said that he drew inspiration from Harpo Marx and Buster Keaton, along with Charles Bronson's performance in Once Upon a Time in the West, to prepare for Willy's Wonderland, and I absolutely believe him. He plays it as both a comedic and a serious role at the exact same time. Cage cleaning an abandoned building and beating monsters to death while intermittently playing pinball and chugging soda just feels right. You're probably not gonna find any memes here like you would with Vampire's Kiss or the remake of The Wicker Man, but this fits in perfectly with his more recent roles in movies like Mandy and The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.

I've long forgotten specifically who I heard it from, but I once heard an online film critic say, "A movie doesn't have to be good to be awesome." And that's a perfect way to sum up Willy's Wonderland. It is not a perfect movie by any means, but it damn sure is a fun one. I've watched it more than once and it's still one of the most entertaining B-movies I've seen in a very long time. This movie goes all in in the silliness, which is one of the big reasons I prefer it over the Five Nights at Freddy's movie. I don't need Blumhouse playing this concept seriously while trying to shoehorn in a bunch of fanservice from video games I'll never play, I just need Nicolas Cage fighting monsters. That suits me just fine.

Final Rating: ***½

Five Nights at Freddy's (2023)

A new subgenre of horror began to carve out a niche for itself during the second half of the 2010s. It came to be called "mascot horror," due to the villains usually being colorful characters that could easily be mistaken for (or sometimes actually are) the mascots of a beloved children's franchise.

If you're not familiar with it, mascot horror has made its home in the world of independent video games. An absolute ton of them have been released on Steam over the last decade, with notable examples including Poppy Playtime and Bendy and the Ink Machine. But much like how Godzilla is the king of all monster movies, at the top of the entire "mascot horror" subgenre sits Five Nights at Freddy's.

Developed by Scott Cawthon, Five Nights at Freddy's began as a single game published on Steam in the summer of 2014. Indie games arrive and disappear all the time, so despite the good reviews it got, it likely would've just flown under everyone's radars had it not been for YouTube. Videos about the game by a number of super-popular YouTubers got millions of views, shining a spotlight on the game and helping make it a surprise success.

It was so successful, in fact, that Cawthorn created a sequel just three months after the first game's release, and it's snowballed from there. Five Nights at Freddy's has since blossomed into a franchise that's produced twenty official games by my count, as well as novels, tabletop games, Halloween costumes, coloring books, toys, an insane amount of fanmade projects, and an attraction as part of the 2025 edition of "Halloween Horror Nights" at Universal Studios Hollywood. One of its villains even appears alongside a cornucopia of iconic horror characters as downloadable content for Dead by Daylight.

So of course, Hollywood came calling to make a movie too.

After years of production delays and behind-the-scenes shake-ups during its development, Blumhouse Productions and Universal Studios released a Five Nights at Freddy's film adaptation simultaneously in theaters and on Peacock a few days before Halloween in 2023. And while it was largely panned by critics, it was a box office success and became one of Blumhouse's biggest hits.

Having never played any of the games (and never having had any interest whatsoever in them, if I may be honest), I didn't have a lot of interest in the movie. But the sequel comes out today and I could use some content for this blog, so what the heck, I might as well watch it. And truth be told, it's just okay at best. It's a passable movie that could've been worse, but it could have been much better too.

Meet Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson), a man with low prospects and an unfortunate inability to stay employed. It leaves him unable to pay his bills, and at risk of being both evicted from his home and losing custody of his little sister Abby (Piper Rubio). But an odd opportunity soon presents itself when Mike is offered a job working as an overnight security guard at Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria. A combination of pizzeria and playground, it was immensely popular back in the '80s, but was shut down at its peak after five children went missing. Now it merely stands as an abandoned, dilapidated shell of its former self.

Mike's first few nights seem relatively unremarkable, mostly just dozing off on the job and dealing with the mess a group of vandals left behind. But when he has to start bringing Abby to work with him following the disappearance of her babysitter, shit really starts to hit the fan. It turns out the pizzeria's four animatronic mascots ― Bonnie, Foxy, Chica, and Freddy Fazbear himself ― can come to life. While Abby believes them to be her friends, Mike discovers that they have more malevolent intentions that put both he and his sister in grave danger.

I will be upfront and say that I am not the target audience for Five Nights at Freddy's. That's why it took me two whole years to bother watching the movie, because I had a feeling that much like the games, the movie just wouldn't be for me. And having actually watched it now, I can say that my suspicions were correct. But that's not to say I hated it either. There's a lot of stuff here that I wanted to like, a lot of elements that would've made for something fantastic had the movie itself just been stronger as a whole. Five Nights at Freddy's is one of those times where I saw there was a chance it could be really good, but it stopped just a few yards short of the goal line.

The biggest problem I had with the movie is that it felt like Emma Tammi's direction and the script written by she, Seth Cuddleback, and Cawthon didn't strike me as being very confident in knowing just what kind of movie was supposed to be made. The first half of the movie gives us a scene where Freddy and the other mascots separate and kill a group of vandals that have broken in, and you begin to think that's where the movie might go. There's lots of jump scares, and a sequence that's actually pretty tense by kid-friendly standards. But then the second half of the movie starts leaning more towards something that tries to be more psychologically thrilling when it really isn't.

The dueling plotlines of a custody battle between Mike and his aunt over Abby, and Mike's recurring and evolving nightmares about the abduction of he and Abby's brother many years earlier, feels like something I would expect from a horror movie that's a bit more mature. Maybe put a full-fledged cult in there, maybe put Ari Aster's name on there as a producer, and it'd be one of the "emotional trauma porn" horror movies that A24 and Neon have released over the last few years.

It doesn't really do the mature stuff well, nor the "killer Chuck E. Cheese animatronics" side either. Neither the director nor the script put the idea of being stuck inside an rundown arcade/pizzeria with a bunch of monsters to any good use. The set design is downright bland, and there's never any energy pulled from it. Outside of one scene near the end where Abby hides in an old ballpit, the setting itself is never really utilized at all. You're in an arcade and singing, dancing creatures that look like they escaped from a demented furry convention are trying to kill you, you can do something to play up the inherent silliness of it. The movie's concept and the outfits Freddy and his friends wear are too good to just half-ass it. I know the franchise's main demographic is kids, but this movie is begging for someone to use it as an excuse to completely rip off Chopping Mall.

And then there's a cast who I think weren't bad, but they deserved more than what they had to work with. Josh Hutcherson's performance feels like he was desperate for better material than what he was given, while I found Piper Rubio was adorable. I did like Elizabeth Lail as well, even though I thought her character (that of a local cop who slowly tells Mike about the pizzaria's dark history) was a little on the bland side.

The best parts of the whole movie, though, came from two people who are barely in the movie at all. One I wanted to highlight is Matthew Lillard. He's barely in the movie at all, showing up at just the beginning and again during the climax. But Lillard milks what time he has for everything it's worth, stealing what scenes he's in by overacting his ass off and being one of the most memorable elements of the movie because of it.

The other actor I wanted to highlight is Mary Stuart Masterson as Mike and Abby's aunt, who is trying to get guardianship of Abby solely so she can get financial assistance from the government. Much like Lillard, Masterson only appears in a few scenes and has roughly six or seven minutes of screen time in total. She makes it every second count, however, by being wonderfully bitchy and making you love to hate her character.

As I said before, Five Nights at Freddy's wasn't made for me. It was made for its fans. And that's perfectly fine! There's nothing wrong with that. But I'm on the outside looking in, watching a celebration of something that I know so precious little about. Speaking as an outsider, Five Nights at Freddy's is almost two hours of mediocrity. I don't want to say it was a victim of the old trope that movie adaptations of video games are bad, because it isn't. But it has so many half-baked ideas and so much unrealized potential that I'm more disappointed with the movie than anything else.

Today sees the theatrical release of Five Nights at Freddy's 2, and I'll likely give it a shot when it eventually hits streaming. So here's hoping that the sequel will be more satisfying than the first one.

Final Rating: **

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues (2025)

Now I know what you're thinking, "Why dust off this old review blog after so long?" It's been three years since the last time I posted anything, and even then, I hadn't posted with any regularity since 2014.

But I do swing by here every so often to reminisce, and fix typos I hadn't noticed while I'm at it. After a while, I started thinking maybe I should come back here once in a while and have a little chat about movies. Not all the time, but every so often.

And if I'm going to do something resembling a comeback, I might as well do it by talking about a recent movie featuring another comeback, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues.

Much like how I never really thought I'd come back to this blog, I also never would've expected a sequel to This Is Spinal Tap, especially since it's been so long since it was released. I absolutely adore the original movie, and while I fully anticipated its sequel being nowhere near as good as the first one, I still held out hope that it would at least be able to recapture at least a little bit of the original's magic. But while there are moments that are a good bit of fun, Spinal Tap II feels less like a full-fledged sequel and more like an 83-minute epilogue that should've only ran half that time.

Four decades have passed since filmmaker Marty DeBergi (Rob Reiner) followed the heavy metal band Spinal Tap as they toured the United States to promote their then-recent album Smell the Glove. The subsequent documentary proved very popular, bringing Spinal Tap success they'd never seen before. But after a while, they went their separate ways and haven't spoken to one another in fifteen years. But the fates have aligned to bring Spinal Tap back together one last time.

We learn as the movie begins that the daughter of the band's now-deceased former manager has inherited a contract as part of her father's estate that requires one more concert from them. The contract was thought worthless at first, but then interest in Spinal Tap's music spiked after a video of country music legends Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood covering one of the band's old hits went viral online. And thus, Marty is tasked with following the misadventures of lead singer David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean), guitarist Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), and bassist Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer) as they come out of retirement for one last show in New Orleans.

If you didn't catch it from the introduction, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues is not what I hoped it would be. The charm of the original movie just plain isn't there this time around. While the main threesome continue to blend well together, as they've recorded two albums and done live performances as their characters since the release of the first movie (some of which is actually depicted in Spinal Tap II itself), much of the energy we saw in 1984 doesn't seem to be there.

For example, the bit about Spinal Tap's residence in New Orleans also being a prime spot for a ghost hunting tour honestly isn't that funny. The scene where the band auditions drummers feels like it went on for longer than it probably should've, when the whole thing is just a callback to the first movie's joke about the band's numerous ill-fated drummers. A number of musicians have cameos that just seem superfluous, and a scene about Spinal Tap creating their own version of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has a punchline that feels like it came right out of Zoolander.

There are also parts that I wish had been elaborated upon. The concert's promoter admits early in the movie that he literally knows nothing about music despite promoting concerts being his job, and one scene near the end makes makes him feel like he could've been a potential antagonist. But he's a non-factor for practically the whole movie. I also thought the way Spinal Tap's lives had gone in different directions and why they hadn't spoken in fifteen years could've added a little more to the movie, Michael and Nigel butt heads briefly during the third act, and that's it as far as that goes. C'mon, fellas, just give me a little something.

I so dearly wanted to like Spinal Tap II. I'd been looking forward to seeing it as soon as it was first announced. But now that I have, I feel underwhelmed. It does not in any way tarnish the first movie, but the sequel is largely disappointing. There's an argument to be made that it probably didn't even need to be made at all. At one point during the movie, Michael McKean's character describes the band's impromptu jam session with Paul McCartney as “a thrill I wish I could enjoy more.” I can say the same about Spinal Tap II.

Final Rating: **