“jessie buckley flicking between a chicago drawl and cut-glass shelley wit while ink-stained and white-haired is the only thing holding this glorious mess together and honestly that's enough for me. maggie gyllenhaal threw gothic horror, a punk feminist manifesto, puttin on the ritz AND bonnie & clyde at the wall and like half of it slid right off but i was obsessed the entire time. it has four endings? five? i lost count and by the third i was leaning back going girl what are we DOING but then buckley would do something deranged and i'd lean right back in. a beautiful captivating disaster, which is the only kind of disaster worth watching. five skulls for the swing, the rest of the points docked for restraint they should NOT have shown”
“the guy whose jaw gets left hanging by like three threads of tissue and then just DECIDES to keep living??? sir lie down. i thought about that prosthetic flapping for the rest of the runtime. anyway seann william scott playing it dead straight broke my brain a little, stifler proposing in the woods and meaning it. shot on grimy 16mm so you can practically smell the heat coming off it, and then they go and ruin it with a drone shot like ma'am that camera did not exist in 1974. dolly herself (max the impaler, towering mannequin nightmare) is a genuinely great new shape, i just wish i cared about anyone the way i was supposed to. macy makes the dumbest decisions in the tristate area and i would simply have walked back to the car the second i saw dolls nailed to trees. still. nasty in the way i wanted”
“the part that actually got me wasn't the running or the slime, it was the realization that they *learn*. one of them figures something out and suddenly they ALL know it. networked zombies sharing intel like a group chat is so much scarier than a guy just chewing on you. gianna jun spends two hours never once catching her breath and i felt that in my own chest. yeah the second half jams in way too much drama between people who should be running, and yeah i've seen the raid, but the contortionists doing whatever they were doing in that stairwell? i would simply not be in that building. rip to everyone working that biotech conference”
“so i did the thing where i watched this with my good headphones on at midnight which in hindsight was a war crime against myself. for like 60 minutes i was lowkey checking my watch because it really is the same five beats on a loop, evy doubts the tape, evy listens again, evy looks scared, repeat. and then the LAST stretch happens and the pipe thing gets explained and i actually said no out loud to an empty room. nina kiri carrying a whole movie with basically just her face and a pair of noise-cancelling headphones is genuinely nuts. not the second coming the marketing promised but the ending earned my whole body going cold”
“the first fifteen minutes of this had me by the THROAT. that house, the floodlight catching just a sliver of something in the dark, the heavy breathing through the bodycam, i was genuinely clenched. then the supernatural stuff kicks in and the demon shows up and it's like oh. ok. that's it. they made the camera mandatory which is the smartest part of the whole thing because nobody can ever do the thing where they put it down, but then they spend the back half showing you a creature that wouldn't scare a kindergartner. catherine lough haggquist as the mom is doing real work in here btw, those two scenes with her are the only times it feels like a movie about people. 75 minutes and it STILL drags by the end which is honestly a feat. this is a great vhs short trapped in a feature's body and i kind of resent that it knows it”
“bones getting her big toenail ripped off with tweezers and just *laughing* because she does that to herself after practice anyway is genuinely the best thing in here and i was howling. then ten minutes later someone gets a fork in the eye played dead serious and i'm like ok so which movie are we. the blade pointe shoes in unison made me physically yell at my tv though, rewound it twice. shame uma thurman shows up does the silliest little accent and then never gets to actually fight anyone... you don't book the bride to make her stand in a doorway. fun when it's dumb, lost whenever it tries to be a real story”
