Return to Silent Hill (2026)

When it comes to horror video games, I've rarely ever dipped my toes into the dark waters of the Silent Hill franchise. I've honestly only ever played three games in the whole series. (And that's assuming the "P.T." demo from 2014 counts as an actual game.) That said, the extremely basic concept of Silent Hill – an abandoned town turns someone's inner demons into actual monsters – is an amazing foundation on which to build frightening psychological stories.

But I've always been more of a movie fan than a gamer. That's one of the big reasons I haven't played the majority of the franchise's games. But judging by the trailers alone, I just had to see the Silent Hill movie adaptations when they were released in 2006 and 2012. Knowing less about the franchise back then than I do now, I enjoyed the first movie while being immensely disappointed with its sequel. But now that I've slowly gotten more familiar with the games, I was genuinely excited when I heard there would be a new movie directly based on Silent Hill 2.

Though I haven't played the original PlayStation 1 version of Silent Hill 2 that was published by Konami in 2001, I adore its 2024 remake and was ready to walk into the new movie and absolutely love it. I'd seen its abysmally low score on Rotten Tomatoes, but I didn't care. I held out hope that the movie, titled Return to Silent Hill, would terrify me just as much as the remake of Silent Hill 2 did.

But as I sat in that theater, I began to realize that what I'd heard was correct. Return to Silent Hill is absolute garbage. There are not enough synonyms for the word "bad” to properly describe it. And the more I think about the movie, the more I go over the notes I scribbled down in the theater's parking lot to prepare for the writing of this review, the more upset I get. As a fan of the horror genre and of movies in general, I'm almost insulted by just how awful Return to Silent Hill is.

The movie follows James Sunderland (Jeremy Irvine), a struggling artist that was deeply in love with his girlfriend Mary (Hannah Emily Anderson). But the pair separated some time ago, and James has fallen into a spiral of deep depression and alcoholism without her. So when he receives a mysterious note from Mary that beckons him back to her hometown, a small New England town called Silent Hill, James drops everything to rush there.

Nothing about Silent Hill is how he remembers it, however. It is almost completely abandoned, most of the roads are closed off, and the town is blanketed in a thick fog and falling ash. He also encounters a small handful of locals that can't quite grasp why he would ever come back to Silent Hill at all. One of then, Maria (also played by Hannah Emily Anderson), even follows him around and tries talking him into leaving. But James remains adamant that Mary is somewhere to be found, continuing his search even as he discovers that Silent Hill is also now home to ungodly monsters and an alternate version of itself that is roughly equivalent to stepping into Hell.

I don't know if I could've prepared myself for just how bad Return to Silent Hill is. That's an odd statement to make, considering that nine times out of ten, a horror movie released in the Hollywood dumping ground that is January isn't going to be very good. But then there's the fact that I've seen practically no advertising for it whatsoever. There was a trailer posted on YouTube a few months ago, an occasional sponsored post on Facebook, some articles on the popular horror news site Bloody Disgusting (which is coincidentally owned by Cineverse, this movie's distributor), and that's been it. A horror movie released in January with minimal advertising, and it's based on a video game too... that's a bunch of red flags. The resounding consensus I saw after that trailer dropped was, "wow, Return to Silent Hill looks like it's gonna suck.” The consensus was right, because it absolutely did did suck.

I've seen a lot of bad movies, and a lot of bad video game adaptations, but it is baffling that everyone involved with making Return to Silent Hill decided that this was the best they could do. Were the producers exploiting some kind of tax shelter, like Uwe Boll used to do? Were they in danger of losing the film rights back to Konami if they didn't make something? Did they just not care?

I genuinely enjoyed the first Silent Hill movie twenty years ago. So when I saw its director, Christophe Gans, returning to the franchise twenty years later as this movie's director and co-writer, I wanted to get my hopes up. But as they said in The Shawshank Redemption, hope is a dangerous thing. Gans brings nothing to Return to Silent Hill. It is a lifeless, utterly miserable watch. There is no tension, any attempts at being scary are weak at best, and there is absolutely no subtlety whatsoever.

Gans also apparently decided that he wanted his storytelling to be as jarring as possible. On more than one occasion, he switches to a first-person perspective with no warning and for seemingly no reason other than it was briefly done in one Silent Hill 2 cutscene. He also haphazardly bounces us back and forth between current day and flashbacks, and between what's happening in Silent Hill and subplot about James's psychiatrist repeatedly trying (and failing) to contact him that becomes utterly inconsequential by the end of the movie.

I'm surprised at just how cheap the movie looked as well. I know the budget was very modest (I've heard somewhere around 23 million dollars), but it looks like they didn't spend a dime of it. The set design is poor, the CGI and green screen effects are really badly done, and the monster makeup effects often made me think Gans and his crew spent a day shopping at Spirit Halloween. I'm not joking about that, either. I've seen cosplayers dressed as Silent Hill's monsters at conventions that look better than what we see here. There's also a scene where we see James with a beard, and it is insanely obvious that the beard is a wig. There's no hiding it, you can see the seams and everything. It looks so spectacularly fake, I almost can't believe someone approved it being in front of the camera. If I had been directing this movie and saw Jeremy Irvine walk onto set wearing that thing, I would have immediately stopped filming so I could spend an hour screaming at the makeup department with all the rage I could muster.

Atmosphere is also one of the most important parts of the franchise as a whole, but Gans seemingly said "not in my movie, it isn't.” The overwhelming sense of oppressive dread from the video game version of this story is gone as well. Instead, there's just stuff going on at all times. There is no opportunity for anything that's happened to sink in. Something is always going on, along with a distracting amount of visual noise even when the movie tries to slow down. The feeling of loneliness as James walks around the town is utterly gone, as is the pure nightmare fuel of the town's hellish "Otherworld.”

Whenever you see a monster, it isn't a threat, just something that just shows up solely to be there. The popular "bubble head nurses” only appear as a swarm to be charged through at the end of the movie. The "Abstract Daddy,” one of the most disgusting monsters from the whole Silent Hill franchise for multiple reasons, shows up for maybe ten seconds before disappearing without a fight. Even "Pyramid Head,” the Silent Hill 2 creature who became so iconic that he's practically the franchise's mascot now, is just a distraction and not something to really be feared.

Some of this also comes from the script Gans co-wrote with Sandra Vo-Anh and William Schneider too. I can accept adaptations having to alter or outright remove things from the source material, because sometimes that just happens. Something might not translate well, or the story needs to be condensed to keep the adaptation from being excessively long. But Gans, Vo-Anh, and Schneider completely bungled this. There are changes made to the story that are either wholly unnecessary or painfully frustrating. The recurring character of James's therapist is new to the story and adds absolutely nothing to the movie.

I also found the alterations to what made it over from the game to be confusing. Eddie, an important supporting character from the game, relegated to a single scene that could've easily been cut from the movie with no harm done to its narrative. The changes to key plot points, among them the backstories and motivations of Mary, Laura, and Angela, also actively hurt the story and make the movie less scary. These changes to crucial elements of the original story take away much of the psychological and psychosexual horror that made both versions of Silent Hill 2 so terrifying.

This absolutely guts the original story's entire emotional core. One of the major reasons the Silent Hill franchise has been so popular is because the horror is derived from a myriad of deeply personal, almost taboo topics. Silent Hill 2 specifically shows us a traumatized rape victim blaming themselves for what's happened to them, someone's mental instability leading them to believe that killing others will fix their problems, and the toll a terminal illness takes on both the person diagnosed as well as their loved ones. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. On top of that, almost everything and everyone James encounters in the game's story is some kind of reflection of himself as well. James's mental health has reached a breaking point and his journey throughout the game is one that forces him to reconcile the choices he's made that have brought him to Silent Hill. Something similar has happened to Angela and Eddie, whose situations somewhat mirror his own. Their stories compliment James's in a way that still places him at the center of the overarching plot even beyond his deceptively simple role as the protagonist.

In the movie, Eddie has a small, pointless cameo and Angela has been completely overhauled into a local crazy girl (whose purpose in the story is also completely different now), with everything ultimately being about Mary. Everything is there because of her, everything is her fault when it shouldn't be. Flashbacks show us that Mary was part of a cult, and it led to tension between she and James. The inclusion of this cult as part of the movie does more harm that good. It contributes nothing beyond ruining the utter tragedy that was the story of Mary and James. The video game Mary was a cancer patient instead of a cult member, and the randomness of the disease leading to her ultimate fate was a driving part of James's journey. That's taken away with the introduction of the cult. I understand that a cult is part of some of the Silent Hill games, but it feels so out of place here. It not just affects how we view Mary, but how we view James as well. Video game James is haunted by Mary's death and his role in it, but movie James is just some sad drunk in a spooky town that has to fight his way out, eliminating any emotional impact there could've been.

And when I said earlier that there was no subtlety whatsoever, I meant it. The fact that Maria looks quite a bit like Mary is one thing, something the game itself touches on. But the ultimate revelation as to why Hannah Emily Anderson is playing three characters (with the aforementioned Angela being the third) feels so hackneyed that I wouldn't have believed the movie did it if I hadn't seen it myself. And this lack of subtlety is especially obvious by the bold decision the writers made to turn the subtext into just the text by outright stating what Pyramid Head symbolizes with absolutely no ambiguity whatsoever, to the point that it felt like they were trying to hit the audience over the head with it.

The minuscule cast is also poor, but considering how badly written their characters are written, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. The supporting characters are all forgettable, but then you barely ever see them anyway, so it's not really of any concern whether they were good or bad. Jeremy Irvine and Hannah Emily Anderson are the only actors on screen for the majority of the movie, with Anderson playing three characters as I said earlier, while Irvine is given the task of being the person who the movie is supposed to gravitate around.

Anderson is given practically nothing to do despite having three roles to play, with none of them being particularly deep. There's nothing for her to sink her teeth into with these roles. It's especially bad with Angela, is (as I said earlier) painted as the shallow "crazy local girl" trope for much of the movie despite being such a tragic character in the games.

Irvine, meanwhile, is supposed to be the main character, but he's just so damn boring. There's no gravitas to his performance. Saying that the James Konami gave us in 2001 and 2024 was a guilt-ridden man being eaten alive by heartache and the memories of his wife doesn't begin to scratch the surface of the character. But Irvine's just kinda... there. They tell you he's upset about Mary, but Irvine never tries to make you believe it. His performance feels hollow, almost like he was told to just say his lines, hit his marks, and don't put any thought into what he was doing. It's another in a long line of things that ruins the emotional weight of what could've been something tragic.

We are only three weeks into 2026, and we've already been given a contender for one of the worst movies of the year. You might be thinking to yourself, "If you wanted the game, why not just play the game?” That isn't the point. I'm not saying Return to Silent Hill necessarily needed to be a 1:1 translation of Silent Hill 2. Look at Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining, for example. It is widely considered a poor adaptation of Stephen King's novel but is still heralded as one of the greatest horror movies ever made. You don't need to do the exact same thing beat for beat, note for note as long as it's still a good movie. But holy shit, Return to Silent Hill is both a terrible adaptation and a terrible movie. It either misunderstood, ignored, or just failed at doing every single thing that made the original Silent Hill 2 such a gripping story.

Even when divorced from the video games and viewed on its own merits, Return to Silent Hill is still abysmal. It's as if everyone involved in the movie, from the top of the credits to the bottom, just shrugged their shoulders and said, "yeah, whatever.” The only person involved who seemed to put forth any effort was composer Akira Yamaoka, and all he even did was re-record his beautiful and haunting music from the video games. Return to Silent Hill is the kind of bad movie that comes along just once in a while, the kind of bad movie that you just can't believe exists and that someone would be okay with releasing to the general public. It feels like an amateur movie that would be made by kids that had neither a budget nor talent.

The saddest part of all this? Evie Templeton – who provided Laura's voice in the Silent Hill 2 remake – actually plays the character here too, and they never gave her the chance to say Laura's "see ya, fart face!” line from the game. I might've actually given the movie a good review if they'd done just that. But much like the people that visit the eponymous town, we can't have nice things in Return to Silent Hill.

Final Rating: *

The Substance (2024)

Very few movies ever truly catch my eye during awards season. The overwhelming majority of what's nominated for the top categories at the Academy Awards or Golden Globes likely won't appeal to me if I've even heard of them at all. That's not to say they're bad, that's just me saying I'm uninterested. But there was one that stood out among all the rest last year: The Substance.

I first saw The Substance just after the announcement of the Golden Globe nominees last year, and I knew precious little about it going in. I'd seen the trailer, knew it was a "body horror" movie, and that was it. The fact that it's a body horror movie caught me off guard, because I've been a horror fan for much of my life and am in no way used to seeing horror movies receive the overwhelming amount of love and praise The Substance got coming out of the Cannes Film Festival. Not to disparage the efforts of Jordan Peele's cast and crew, but Get Out won and was nominated for tons of awards and I still don't remember it having nearly the same amount of praise heaped upon it in 2017 as The Substance did in 2024.

I was afraid to watch it, honestly. I was afraid it would be insanely overrated, more hype than anything else. But I worked up the courage and loved it, and a year later, I am still upset that it didn't run the table at the the Oscars. And now that I might be here a little bit more often, let's do what I should've done here a year ago and talk about how freaking great The Substance is.

The movie quickly introduces us to Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a once-acclaimed actress whose career has hit the skids. She was an Oscar winner at her peak, but a lack of meaningful work has left her stuck hosting a cheesy aerobics TV show. Or to be more accurate, she was hosting an aerobics TV show. I say that because Elizabeth is fired by her sleazeball producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid) on her fiftieth birthday because he wants the host to be someone younger and sexier. And just to make sure her birthday is even worse, a distraught Elizabeth finds herself in a nasty car wreck almost immediately after leaving the show's studio and ends up in the hospital.

It is at the hospital where Elizabeth's life will begin heading in a direction she couldn't have possibly foreseen. A young nurse slips her a thumb drive containing an advertisement for "The Substance," a black market drug promising to unlock a "younger, more beautiful, more perfect" version of those who use it. Though initially hesitant, Elizabeth ultimately decides the Substance is for her.

The Substance does indeed awaken a idealized version of Elizabeth, a young woman who literally tears her way out of Elizabeth's spinal column while leaving the 50-year-old woman we knew comatose on her bathroom floor. Adopting the name "Sue" (Margaret Qualley), this new self immediately charms Harvey and is hired to be the aerobics show's new host. Sue becomes an overnight sensation and begins living the life Elizabeth had wished for.

But use of the Substance comes with very strict instructions. Elizabeth and Sue are still technically the same person, and they must transfer their consciousness back and forth every seven days. Doses of the Substance must be closely regulated, and even the slightest abuse of or deviation from these rules can have disastrous consequences. And it wouldn't be a proper horror movie if those rules went unbroken.

Sue enjoys the limelight and her hedonistic lifestyle a bit too much, staying active longer than recommended. It starts as just a few short hours past the time limit. Hours become days, days become weeks, with Sue's excesses doing increasingly terrible damage to Elizabeth's body. This is exacerbated by their opposing views on how the Substance should be used and their increasingly different personalities, the whole thing ultimately leading Elizabeth and Sue to a war over what's supposed to be their shared consciousness.

When one sees the "body horror" label, one might think of John Carpenter's The Thing or most of David Cronenberg's movies. The Substance goes in its own direction. It is a gore-soaked indictment of this mistreatment of women by Hollywood's producers and casting directors (for example, Dennis Quaid's character sharing a name with Harvey Weinstein can't possibly be a coincidence), and an utterly unsubtle tale about ageism and someone who wants to change the flaws they perceive they have. That makes The Substance not quite feel like a horror movie in a traditional sense. It's not a ghost story, a zombie movie, a home invasion thriller, or a slasher movie. Instead, it's a horror movie about someone who simply hates where their life has taken them.

At the helm is writer/director Coralie Fargeat, who had only made one other feature film before this, that being the 2017 thriller Revenge. I watched Revenge while I was going through the notes I took for this review, and I can confidently say that Fargeat is a filmmaker who knows exactly what she wants to say and how she wants her films to say it for her. She has a bold voice and style, which she puts to fantastic use in The Substance.

Fargeat had some amazing tools at her disposal while making the movie too. There's the intense, thumping electronic score composed by Raffertie, great editing, and fantastic cinematography. There are lots of uncomfortable closeups (especially when it comes to men eating food, something I noticed Fargeat also did in Revenge), along with disorienting shots of long corridors and camera angles that make smaller rooms look cavernous. Fargeat does not want to give you a moment to rest or to feel at ease, she wants to make sure you are not comfortable at all while watching this movie.

Another thing Fargeat carried over from Revenge was her striking use of colors. Instead of the sandy browns and sky blues of Revenge, we get much more in The Substance. There's the stark white tiling of Elizabeth and Sue's bathroom, the yellow of Elizabeth's coat, the greys and navy blues of their apartment's living room, the fluorescent green of the Substance itself. Fargeat's use of colors is almost more and more unsettling as the movie goes on, because you don't expect a movie like this to be this colorful. It's like Dorothy landed in the messed up part of Oz.

I also liked Fargeat approached the way the story was told. For example, the movie begins with a a two-minute montage at the beginning of the movie that centers solely around Elizabeth's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. We see the creation of her star, we see the fanfare she enjoyed so much at the peak of her career. But the passage of time and exposure to the elements create cracks in the star, tourists notice it and can't remember where they know Elizabeth from, people drop garbage on it. The transition from that montage to the taping of her aerobics show is all the backstory we need. We're told everything need to know in a way that I thought made for a creative way to begin the movie.

Even the set designers contributed to telling the story, with an oversized picture of Elizabeth that faces the windows in her apartment's living room, perpetually staring out at a billboard with Sue's face on it. It works as a very unique to approach Elizabeth and Sue's war. They're constantly face to face, staring at one another even while one is unconscious and the other is active.

But now that I think about it, it may not be as much a war between an aging woman and her younger doppelganger as it is one between an aging woman and her own fears and insecurities. Trying to hold herself to the standards of others has made Elizabeth her own worst enemy. As the Substance's advertisement itself says, "You can't escape from yourself."

I say this because by using Elizabeth and Sue are two sides of the same coin. It's who Elizabeth is versus who she wishes she could be. Sue abuses her time being active, while Elizabeth abuses herself by binging on every edible thing she can find in her kitchen while hiding from the outside world. Sue is young, gorgeous, and popular. She relishes all the attention she gets and has absolutely no problem with using her sex appeal to her advantage. She's also impulsive and prone to making rash decisions that will hurt her in the long run. Elizabeth, on the other hand, is very self-conscious about her age and brought down by men that view her as past her prime and treat her like a commodity that has lost its value. Elizabeth is also very jealous of Sue's fame and resents her for having what she desperately wanted to regain, while Sue intentionally ignores the rule about switching places because dealing with Elizabeth is getting in her way.

I mentioned earlier that Fargeat had some great tools at her disposal, and I would be foolish if I did not mention that one of them is the cast. There's not a lot of actors in the main cast, but it's not meant to be a huge ensemble anyway. Let's start with Dennis Quaid, whose character is the slimiest asshole you'll ever see. Quaid's performance is completely over the top, which is perfect for the character and the movie as a whole. Margaret Qualley is also great as Sue. Sue is a vain, self-centered bitch, and Qualley does a great job putting that forward.

The movie, however, is completely owned by Demi Moore. There were so many award ceremonies that saw Moore nominated in the Best Actress category, and for good reason. It had been said by pretty much everyone that talked about The Substance immediately after its release that she hasn't had any really notable roles in the last twenty-five years, spending being more known as tabloid fodder since the turn of the millennium. I think I know more about her marriage to and divorce from Ashton Kutcher than I do any movies she's been in since the year 2000. But The Substance, however, shows just how good an actress Moore is.

It's a brave turn for her, as the concept requires not only for her character to start vulnerable and become more and more bitter and angry as we build towards the movie's utterly unhinged final twenty minutes, but also requires Moore (who was 61 when the movie was released, a full decade older than her character) to wear an increasing amount of hideous monster makeup as the movie progresses. If the people that thought her shaving her head for G.I. Jane was a big deal back in 1997 knew this would be in her future, they'd have lost their minds.

But her performance is more than just wearing heavy prosthetic effects and being upset with men treating her like she's unattractive because she's middle-aged. There is a scene roughly halfway through the movie where Elizabeth is preparing to go out on a date with a high school classmate who believes she's still as beautiful as she were when they were teenagers. But one look at Sue's unconscious body and the billboard I mentioned earlier makes her hate her own reflection in the mirror. She can't possibly see herself as being as beautiful as Sue, even after spending another ten minutes trying to doll herself up, so she just angrily wipes her makeup off before ghosting her date. It's a powerful scene, one of the best in the whole movie. It goes a long way in showing just how low Elizabeth's view of herself is, and how strong Moore's performance is. Moore will absolutely convince you of Elizabeth's refusal to believe in herself and that she's been led astray by the superficiality of Hollywood.

If you haven't seen The Substance, you are missing out on what I would call one of the best movies of this decade. I do not believe this to be hyperbole. It's an utterly fantastic movie that is absolutely worth seeing. Will it appeal to everyone? Absolutely not, and I would be foolish to believe that it would. But The Substance is a movie that will stay with you. It's driven heavily by its visuals and Demi Moore's performance, but there's so much more going for it than that. All the gore and shocking body horror might be gross on the surface, but it's also a surprisingly deep story about how gross the treatment of women in Hollywood (and really, the entertainment industry as a whole) can be. If there's one thing for absolutely certain, The Substance is more than just a movie. It is an experience.

Final Rating: *****

Five Nights at Freddy's 2 (2025)

Just in case you missed my review of it earlier this month, I did not like the first Five Nights at Freddy's movie. It was a dishearteningly dull movie, never using its setting or concept for anything beyond inviting the franchise's diehard fans to join a 109-minute Easter egg hunt. It wasn't scary or really worth watching a second time, and the only parts of it I actually liked were barely in the movie at all. But what do I know? The movie made 297 million dollars at the box office, just a fraction short of fifteen times its production budget, when it was released two years ago. Maybe people saw something I didn't.

I also said in my review that I'd likely give the sequel a shot when it hit streaming, and a little over three weeks later, here we are. Much like the last movie, the sequel is full of untapped potential. The potential for an amazing horror movie is painfully obvious as you watch it. But that potential goes utterly untapped. I desperately wanted to like this movie, for its makers to say, "If you didn't like the first movie, we're gonna use the sequel to change your mind." But no, they didn't do that. Five Nights at Freddy's 2 is just more of the same old bullshit I saw last time.

Beyond a brief prologue, the movie takes place one year after we left Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria. Mike (Josh Hutcherson) is trying to put the whole thing behind him, while Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail) is haunted by nightmares of the animatronics and her murderous father (Matthew Lillard). Young Abby (Piper Rubin), however, is still in mourning. The ghosts inside the animatronics were her friends, even if she knew them only briefly.

She sneaks out one night to see them, hoping that they're still some semblance of active, but is heartbroken when she discovers that they aren't. Abby does, however, find a "FazTalker" toy (imagine a Freddy Fazbear-branded version of a Speak & Spell) in the remains of the pizzeria's prize booth and takes it home to remember them by.

But there's some rough stuff up ahead. A group of ghost hunters visit the very first Freddy Fazbear's location, which was closed down shortly after a child was killed there in 1982. They end up accidentally awakening "the Marionette," a cruel animatronic powered by the unfettered rage of that murdered child's spirit. The Marionette contacts Abby through the FazTalker and pretends to be the friendly animatronics she knows, manipulating her into helping the original location's animatronics reach the outside world so that the spirit can finally have the revenge it has spent twenty years longing for.

This is not a good movie. It actually doubles down on what I didn't like about the first one, by having more stuff that could've made for an awesome movie front and center but never doing anything worth a damn with it. Five Nights at Freddy's 2 has fantastic outfits for the animatronic performers to wear, bigger stakes, and an intriguing villain that could be a million times scarier than what we saw in the first movie if used right. But it's still lousy, and that somehow makes it worse. A movie that obviously has all the cards to be great but still turns out bad is somehow more disappointing than just a movie that's simply bad.

Director Emma Tammi returns to helm the movie, and she does a slightly better job behind the camera this time around, but that isn't saying much. The movie's pacing is horribly inconsistent, never really getting into any kind of groove as it stops and starts trying to balance its different subplots. And then there's the fact that absolutely nothing resembling suspense is on the menu at Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria. All you're getting are loud noises and shitty jump scares instead of things that are actually frightening. I know the game franchise relies a lot on that kind of thing and doing that makes it accurate to the games, but it gets very tiresome in movie form. It's the equivalent of someone jumping out of nowhere and blowing an air horn in your ears every few minutes. It's one of those cases where I'd actually be okay with an adaptation straying as far as possible from the source material.

I'm also astounded by how tame the movie is. I know aiming for a PG-13 was a necessity because the movie's target audience is so young. But what little violence is in the movie feels so dreadfully limp because of it. Some characters are attacked via jump scare and disappear from the movie. Another is torn to pieces and what we see looks like a production assistant hacked up a mannequin and threw the parts onto the set. Someone else gets his head crushed by "Toy Freddy" and it just looks like he's getting a scalp massage. I'd be foolish to expect a ton of gore, but give us something.

There is, however, one sequence roughly forty minutes into the movie that I really liked, where Vanessa tries confronting the spirit of her father in a dream. The scene is actually very well done, genuinely serving as the scariest part of the movie. The whole movie being more like this would've made for something I'd have enjoyed a lot more (or at least hated less).

Franchise creator Scott Cawthon, meanwhile, has sole writing credit for the sequel, and you can definitely tell he's a game developer and not a screenwriter. The story feels like a bunch of subplots that Cawthon came up with but never bothered developing. For example, Abby is ostracized at school because her classmates all think she's a weirdo, with only one little boy giving her the time of day. Cawthon could've spun that into Abby making a human friend and being at ease without her beloved animatronics, but the little boy only has two or three scenes tops. An epilogue where he invites Abby to hang out with him would've been welcomed, a cute moment to conclude the movie, but he's ultimately not important to anything going on.

And I absolutely cannot forget FazFest. It's established that Mike and Abby's aunt was committed to an asylum after encountering "Golden Freddy" in the first movie, her outrageous story about haunted mascots from the local pizza place sparking an urban legend that becomes the theme of the town festival seen in this movie. However, the festival idea accomplishes nothing outside of "Toy Chica" (who is inexplicably voiced by Megan Fox of Jennifer's Body and Transformers fame) defending an upset Abby from an excessively mean science teacher, as well as a fun moment where "Toy Freddy" is believed to be someone in a costume, but the festival idea doesn't accomplish anything.

The animatronics are out in public at a festival themed around them, why not have them run amuck at the festival itself? Make it like the cornfield rave scene from Freddy vs. Jason. Even if the PG-13 rating would keep it from being a bloodbath, the concept alone could've made for an awesome climax. With the exception of one scene where Vanessa stops "Toy Bonnie" from attacking a family in their house, the last half hour of the movie is at the original pizzeria and the Schmidt house. It leaves the festival as another interesting idea that served no true purpose.

And then there's the cast, who is once again dull as dishwater with the exception of Matthew Lillard. He's genuinely frightening in the one scene he's in. It's the scariest part of the entire movie, and it made me feel like he should be the primary monster instead of the Marionette or the Fazbear gang. But that's the sad part is, like I said, he's in one scene. If any Five Nights at Freddy's fans are reading this, please answer this: does his character get a bigger role in any of the games? I ask because I will absolutely watch as many sequels as it takes for him to be given more to do.

To be fair, I won't completely crap on all the actors in the movie though. Skeet Ulrich isn't bad in his cameo as the father of the spirit haunting the Marionette, and I'd have enjoyed seeing more of Mckenna Grace in her small role as the leader of the ghost hunters. But much like the first movie, Lillard absolutely steals the show here.

One of the ghost hunters asks early in the movie, "What the hell kind of kid would want to come here?" I'm asking myself the same question. It just blows my mind that the Five Nights at Freddy's super-fans would be okay with this. But I guess if they keep making money, why change what works? Five Nights at Freddy's 2 might not be good, but I can't say it wasn't a hit. It'd probably made even more money and waited another few weeks for its digital release if Avatar: Fire and Ash hadn't just come out looking to kill everything else at the December box office. There will surely be a third movie, if the post-credits scenes were any indication. All I can hope is that whenever it comes out, the third time will be the charm and I'll actually like it.

Final Rating: *½

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. I got to see Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, and the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead on the big screen, and it allowed me to see Jaws for the very first time.

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 best friend's couch, 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, he 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 a 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 wish I'd seen from it and other things I 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.

(No, I will not apologize for that bad joke.)

Final Rating: ***½

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 1960s 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 a decade 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 haunted Chuck E. Cheese knockoff" 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 obviously evil 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 Color Out of Space.

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: ****