Boy Kills World by George Wolf Boy Kills World feels like a film the gamers are going to love. For the rest of us, it offers a hyper stylized, uber-violent riff on The Hunger Games by way of Kill Bill while it harbors Deadpool aspirations and a coy surprise waiting in act three. But while the style is never in doubt, real substance is lacking. Bill Skarsgård supplies plenty of physical charisma as “Boy,” whose family was murdered years earlier during a lethal event known as “The Culling.” Once a year in this post apocalyptic landscape, enemies of ruling matriarch Hilda Van Der Koy (Famke Janss ..read more

Infested by Hope Madden Remember Quarantine (or Rec, for that matter)? Remember that moment when you realize you’re locked inside an apartment building, trapped with the ravenous undead? OK, so that but spiders. Nice, right?! Sébastien Vanicek’s Infested (co-written with Florent Bernard) doesn’t steal from other movies as much as it mines the primal fears that have plagued the most effective horror movies from the beginning. Kaleb (Théo Christine) is a well-meaning dumbass. He lives in a dump of a high rise, but he loves the place, loves the neighbors, and cherishes the memory of his mother. T ..read more

Abigail, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Sasquatch Sunset, The People’s Joker, Blood for Dust, With Love and a Major Organ, Villains Inc. The post Screening Room: Abigail, Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Sasquatch Sunset, The People’s Joker & More appeared first on Maddwolf ..read more

Abigail by Hope Madden Back in 2019, directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett had a blast locking a group of evildoers and one innocent inside a luxurious mansion for about 90 minutes of head exploding, weapon wielding, visceral mayhem. The fun they had with Ready or Not was contagious. So catchy that you can certainly feel its influence in the filmmakers’ latest, the ballerina vampire tale Abigail. The first big difference is that in this mansion, no one is innocent. A team has been assembled for a kidnapping: grab a wealthy guy’s kid and hole up in some out-of-the-way safe house unt ..read more

Villains, Inc. by Rachel Willis When their super villain leader dies, three henchmen are left adrift in director Jeremy Warner’s comedy Villains, Inc. It’s an interesting concept told with the kind of mundanity that speaks to real life. Though most of these villains have superpowers and special abilities, they need jobs – just like the rest of us. They also have dreams of the future, just like us. Not perhaps of a summer house in the country, but of world domination.  After the leader dies, Beatrix (Mallory Everton) becomes the group’s de facto number one. The other two (Colin Mochrie and ..read more

The People’s Joker by Hope Madden When Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker premiered at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival, Warner Bros. and their lawyers promptly shut it down. How in keeping with the spirit of the film, an autobiographical glimpse into the filmmaker’s transition that skewers homogenized corporate-controlled art. A multimedia collage of sorts, the film sutures live action with animation to tell of a young person, fed up with their narcissistic mother and absent father, numbed by the conveniently prescribed “Smylex” that’s helped keep reality at bay lo these many years. T ..read more

Sasquatch Sunset by George Wolf After the completely enchanting Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter in 2014 and the whimsical Western Damsel four years later, you might not expect writer/director David Zellner to next film a year in the life of a Sasquatch family. And Yeti did. Sorry, but that joke is just silly enough to fit in with Sasquatch Sunset, if only the movie had any dialog at all. It doesn’t, instead letting the ‘Squatches’ grunts, screams, moans and various other bodily noises speak volumes. Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough, Christophe Zajac-Denek and co-director Nathan Zellner portray the fu ..read more

Once upon a time, there was nothing cooler than a mall. There was no place you would rather be. It was an oasis, a microcosm, and an excellent location for horror. In honor of the 45th anniversary of George Romero’s pinnacle of consumerist horror, we decided to pull together a list of the five most effective shopping mall horrors. 5. Chopping Mall (1986) In 1984, Kelli Maroney found mall side horror in Night of the Comet. Like Halley’s Comet, shopping center disaster returned to Maroney just two years later. She and some pals are planning a wild party inside Park Plaza Mall after closing. But ..read more

Civil War, Sting, Arcadian, La Chimera, Invader, LaRoy Texas The post Screening Room: Civil War, Sting, Arcadian, The Chimera, Invader, LaRoy Texas appeared first on Maddwolf ..read more

LaRoy, Texas by Christie Robb When small-town pushover Ray (John Magaro, Past Lives) finds himself caught up in a blackmail/murder-for-hire scheme, he teams up with high school-acquaintance/bumbling private investigator Skip (Steve Zahn) to get to the bottom of things. This neo-noir crime-comedy is writer/director Shane Atkinson’s first feature (he wrote the screenplay for the 2019 Diane Keaton vehicle Poms). It feels like a streamlined take on the Big Lebowski—mistaken identity gets loser in over his head in a world full of morally ambiguous/dangerous characters. An overly-invested partner in ..read more