In a way similar to Suspiria (2018), the laboured breathing of a dying woman plays across the opening moments of The Undertone (2025): this film is an aural nightmare and no mistake, starting straight away and keeping up that relentless sensory overload throughout.
In a house full of photos and other keepsakes, a young woman called Evy (Nina Kiri) is solely responsible for nursing her mother through the last stages of her end-of-life care. She divides her time between this weighty responsibility and something she can do from home: she co-runs a supernatural-themed podcast, called The Undertone. It’s ‘the only thing keeping her sane’ in a world of illness and loneliness; this is an immensely lonely film. On The Undertone, and in a nod to a recognisable choice of format for such podcasts, Evy takes the role of ‘the sceptic’ to her co-host Justin’s role as ‘the believer’. When he calls to record this week’s show, Justin (Kris Holden-Ried) takes some time out to ask after Evy’s mother, but other than that it’s down to business, which is what Evy apparently prefers. Normality. Structure.
The theme for this week’s show comes as a surprise to Evy: Justin explains that he’s received a selection of ten audio files sent to his email, and his plan is that they can play them on air. With this agreed, Justin starts playing the recordings. It all starts innocently enough: there’s a man called Mike (Jeff Yung) and his pregnant partner Jessa (Keana Lyn Bastidas) and they want to record evidence that Jessa has started talking in her sleep. This evidence is duly captured, but as the recordings go on and as Justin and Evy work through the files, things get steadily more ominous. Perhaps inevitably given his ‘believer’ role, Justin can hear all sorts of masked messages in the recordings, though Evy isn’t so sure and asks to take a second listen, particularly where Jessa begins singing or playing children’s songs; the film digs into something which only ever seems to be just beneath the surface, and that’s the dark origins behind any number of children’s songs, chants, lullabies – you name it. Rest assured, that isn’t where the film starts and ends: this is just one aspect of where it goes next as the podcasters try to piece together what happened to Mike and Jessa.
For Evy, this all seems to be a welcome distraction at first; before too long, you begin to wonder whether she may just be keen to find patterns where there are none because of the chaos of her own life at present. Both of these things could be true; however, what Evy begins to notice is that there are distinct and frightening parallels between what they are uncovering in the recordings and in Evy’s own, fractured life.
Wow, this is grim. It’s already been mentioned that this is a lonely film; more than that, it’s lonely in lots of different ways; it’s a story of compound loneliness, which prepares the ground brilliantly well for what’s to follow. Being a carer is lonely. Watching someone you love die in slow motion is lonely. Evy also has an AWOL boyfriend – we never see him – and even the podcast, her beacon of order and routine, is a remote exercise, just a sequence of voices in her headphones. Being so reliant on these voices, Evy is very vulnerable to them. Through her heightened, anguished perception, we are just as vulnerable to these horrors which are largely heard, rather than seen. There are shades of The Woman in Black (1989) here, as Evy pieces together a story by listening to it (and the house itself becomes complicit in the unfolding, and deeply unsettling story in ways which also feel distinctly similar).
The audio clips themselves are …horrible, just as they should be: there’s just something about being asked to listen for hidden words and meanings – as alluded to in the film – which makes a person suggestible, primed to be scared. Being such an aural horror, The Undertone of course needs to get that aspect right and it absolutely does: not only is it thematically able to riff on longstanding ideas around things like backwards masking, Electronic Voice Phenomena and more recently, creepypasta, but its own surrounding soundscape is suitably all-encompassing and unsettling, too. Then there’s Evy’s mother, her breathing turning more and more into a ‘death rattle’, a presence in the house, but unable to take part in life. Bookending all of that is the film’s use of silence, which is itself something terrifying. As sensory films go, this one is pitch perfect, riddled with unease throughout – and it’s no slouch on the visuals, either: there’s just enough here, with great use of darkness to further that suggestibility. The film also manages to render something like a simple image search for an urban legend into a fundamentally repulsive inclusion.
As this film made such a personal impact on this reviewer, I’m going to abandon the second and third person here: this film got under my skin. It did for me what Longlegs (2024) – which arguably has some similar aspects and visuals – failed to do; The Undertone engineered my brain into a state of primal fight-or-flight and hypervigilance, by getting the small stuff very right, offering up a fantastic performance from Nina Kiri and the supporting cast, and by allowing its bigger picture to come through in good time. There are also lots of complexities to unpick around faith, motherhood, childhood and guilt – particularly guilt, and of course there were vital choices to make on how to resolve all of this in the film’s perfectly-paced and modest runtime, but The Undertone gets that right too. See what you think, but my advice is to suspend your disbelief and go with this perfectly-curated abject terror, a film which feels very up-to-date, but also timeless. This is director and writer Ian Tuason’s first feature, let alone his first horror feature, so if this is anything to go by, then this promises a director with an instinctive understanding of what makes people tick.
The Undertone (2025) recently featured at the Fantasia International Film Festival.
Using the short film format to its absolute best by refusing to waste a second of its economical twelve-minute runtime, Shrimp Fried Rice (2025) is a strangely life-affirming little fantasy which pulls apart the central idea behind – and yes, I mean what I’m about to say – Ratatouille – and turns it into a gloriously weird skit which, as delightfully crazy as it is, somehow also manages to fit in a very human story, too. Kudos to director and co-writer Dylan Pun for doing so much, so neatly.
We start with a plate’s eye view in a restaurant as a serving of (frankly delicious-looking) food is carried to a dining table. As this happens, a diner asks if he can send his compliments to the chef. Erm, okay, says the server – but it turns out that the chef isn’t actually Dave, the friendly guy in the chef’s hat who waves back at them. It’s the guy under the chef’s hat – in this case, a talented, if rather arrogant shrimp and yes, he talks.
Don’t waste time overthinking the presence of a smartass shrimp, because we’re moving onto a backstory. Firstly, the ‘shrimp fried rice’ served to great aplomb by this particular downtown restaurant is fried rice made by a shrimp, not containing shrimp: now there’s some semantics which will stay with you. In this particular universe, it’s not just rats who can command the humans to culinary greatness; any animal that can sit on a person’s head can potentially do it. And it’s popular enough for there to be a popular cooking show competition all about it, where the best animals compete against one another to win a title.
Our wisecracking shrimp (yep, there’s a shrimp puppet) is perhaps understandably proud of what he has achieved in his career and he wants to win that title, come what may. He’s competitive, has no time in particular for a certain (literal) ‘rat bastard’ standing in his way, and – sad to say – he’s not really motivated by his human’s wellbeing. Pride comes before a fall, Shrimpo.
Shrimp Fried Rice feels for all the world like a crazy idea which haunted Pun until he gave it an outlet, and if this is the case, I hope it has helped both him and the team to bring this crazy idea to life. What’s especially impressive, though, is that the film even manages to sneak in a few real-life issues about the exploitation of workers (#TeamDave) but never losing sight of the overall brisk, fun vibe, as any sudden shift of this kind could have derailed the whole film. No such problem here – from the self-aware censorship of the very word Ratatouille (they don’t want to bait Disney after all!) through to the script, the snappy dialogue, the edits, the soundtrack and all the fun little inclusions, everything in Shrimp Fried Rice works incredibly well. It’s bizarre, original and very funny. And just to repeat: they’ve even made the food look good.
Shrimp Fried Rice (2025) featured on 28th July at this year’s Fantasia Film Festival.
There’s something odd pressing in at the edges of the everyday in The Fairy Moon, the latest short film from director Craig Williams – whose last film, The Wyrm of Bwlch Pen Barras, was one of the standouts of 2024. In many respects, we’re getting something in The Fairy Moon which could seem similar to Wyrm, but tonally the newer film is very different. More of a dark comedy than a horror, it only hints at a deeper storyline, dealing instead with the sheer absurdity of a day gone very awry under the influence of something seemingly occult – a word meaning ‘hidden’, it’s worth remembering, which works very well to describe what might be going on here.
Divided into three sections by intertitles with an illustration of the god Pan on each – these intertitles are narratively important – it seems like we know a little more here than the film’s protagonist Roger (Johnny Vivash), but not by a lot. As Roger waits to cross the street, we too may feel rather disconcerted by the opening line of dialogue from a dapper young stranger (James Swanton) who appears over his shoulder, asking him to “Imagine if I just pushed you into the road…” Roger is understandably a little put out by this, and by this person’s energetic, continued presence as he gambols around next to him, full of ‘what ifs?’ Making his excuses, he heads in the opposite direction, citing a ‘busy day’ ahead (though it’s hopefully no spoiler to suggest that Roger goes on to have what seems like the precise opposite of a busy day, as he spends most of his time hanging around in town on his own, though he does bring a biro).
Hiding out in a local bookshop, he’s alarmed to run into the young man again…and again…and he seems to be set on entrapping Roger into certain acts, even basic things which assumedly have a ritual significance – though lost on Roger. The young man explains that he can’t really help his exuberance and his good mood – but it’s clear that he’s bizarrely interested in Roger, and has some sort of plans in store which feel very ominous…
Our English word ‘panic’ is etymologically linked to the pagan god Pan, and The Fairy Moon is filled with a very British sort of panic, whereby a bloke is pushed beyond the bounds of his own nervous politeness into a claustrophobic nightmare. We see lots of close shots of the lead which emphasise his growing discomfort, and because we stick with him for the most part, we don’t really glean a lot about the dapper fella giving Roger such a weird time. There’s inspired casting here, by the way, with Vivash (Cara) doing a star turn as a very normal man, moving through a gamut of reasonable emotions in the face of a very weird few hours, and Swanton as the antagonist works really well too, as here’s an actor who’s forged a decent career in recent years as – with no disrespect meant whatsoever – the archetypal strange bloke (you may have seen his work in Inside No. 9, Stopmotion orThe Thing That Ate The Birds, to name just a few). One way to view this film is to see Roger as, in his way, just as strange and inexplicable in his behaviour as the Dapper Stranger, which adds to the overall absurd-funny tone.
However, the film isn’t really interested in filling in the blanks for us – or at least not to the extent in The Wyrm of Bwlch Pen Barras, which – even without a big reveal – weaves enough together to provide a more cohesive-feeling mythology. There are hints of mythology in The Fairy Moon, but hints they remain, or at least it feels this way at the time of writing (there’s certainly plenty to think about, long after viewing). We get the panic here, but not so much of the Pan. It is clear that there’s a bigger, ritual picture here, but it’s not shared with Roger, or with us. What the antagonist gains isn’t fully expounded, then, but what we do see is that Roger, with his own story in many respects just as obscured, has been forced into something inescapable by forces beyond his control. His culpability is part of a barely-understood nightmare, and whilst there’s probably not enough magic here for all audiences given the premise, The Fairy Moon is nonetheless an intriguing calling card which rewards further attention. It’s also a pleasure to again see great attention to detail, with things like the use of choral music, and the use of 16mm film coming together to create a period, or at least a more timeless atmosphere. There’s also a very funny voice cameo to listen out for…
The Fairy Moon receives its premiere on 27th July at the Fantasia International Film Festival 2025.
Small in scale, unusual in approach, The Woman (2025) is an intriguing one. It begins with some apparently random events, moving from a chance meeting to a sequence of increasingly alarming follow-ups – and as it goes, it gets increasingly psychologically dark. Its oblique approach may not be for everyone, but it’s in that oblique approach that the film is able to pose its biggest, toughest questions about modern life and modern identities.
Chaptered broadly into two parts, starting with ‘The Man’, we begin at a job interview where we meet the film’s lead character, Sun Kyung (Han Hye-Ji). She’s being challenged on her tendency to move jobs a lot: we don’t really want to go to the trouble of training you, her interviewer says, if you’re just going to leave. It’s one of those strange points in your life when someone sitting in a ramshackle office with a seriously unprofessional workmate is nonetheless in a position of power, so Sun Kyung is polite and positive, assuring him that she has no intentions of moving again. She gets the job, so with her new role and her new apartment, it seems she’s up for a fresh start. It feels like she’s only just moved in: she needs all the basics, and she’s pleased to find a vacuum cleaner being given away for free nearby via a marketplace app. She arranges to collect it from the owner’s address, and in a touching, if strange gesture, takes a punnet of strawberries with her to hand over as a small token of thanks.
She gets her vacuum cleaner, but it’s fair to say that the man handing it over is a little odd. He’s friendly, but very nervous and seems paranoid: this makes him behave both overbearingly and tetchily by turns. When she attempts to hand over the strawberries, he refuses on the grounds that his mother was poisoned by a contaminated vitamin drink recently; she died as a result and he feels he can’t take the risk. This isn’t a conversation which you’re likely to be prepared for. Luckily for her, an old college friend just happens to pass by as this situation is unfolding, and her friend – a man called Ui-Jin – intervenes on her behalf, getting into a brief scuffle with the man. Trying perhaps to fix the situation, or in a frenzy of good manners, the man decides he does want the strawberries after all, then he eats a number of them in front of her. She, clearly, can’t wait to get home; the bloody vacuum cleaner doesn’t work either, but it feels like the least of her worries. She texts Ui-Jin her thanks for his help, and settles in for the night.
Things take a turn the following day when Sun Kyung is contacted by the police. It seems that Ui-Jin committed suicide later than evening – by consuming a spiked vitamin drink, exactly as the man said had happened to his mother. They want to talk to her because the altercation was captured on CCTV: she’s happy to do so, but her suspicions are growing, and then when the same man turns up at her apartment block that evening (and sees the now abandoned vacuum cleaner outside in the trash), she begins to get scared. This previously normal, everyday event seems to be escalating into something quite threatening. Clearly Sun Kyung has been socialised into being calm and polite, so she engages with the man, Young-hwan, via her phone – but by the next day, her alarm prompts her to go and do something. She goes back to the police, this time armed with her belief that Young-hwan may have had something to do with Ui-Jin’s death, which perhaps wasn’t a suicide after all.
The police are surprisingly uninterested in her story, though. Partly this is because of the autopsy report, which doesn’t suggest there was any foul play. However there’s something more, and it’s at this point in the film that expectations and certainties begin to splinter; the detective in charge of Ui-Jin’s case runs through a gamut of emotions during his meeting with Sun Kyung, ranging from barely-restrained mirth to annoyance. As she leaves, he speaks to one of his colleagues about her – and it’s this moment of uncertainty which takes us into the film’s second and last chapter, ‘The Woman’.
By the time the second segment of the film starts, it’s Sun Kyung’s own wry smiles which look out of place. Invited to Ui-Jin’s funeral-not-funeral by some of their other peers, she’s not made welcome by all of the party. Drink flows, tempers rise, and talk turns to whether or not their friend really did intend to take his own life. Discussions of private loans and crippling debts are a frequent occurrence in Korean TV and cinema and it happens here, too. But it feels, at this point, that Sun Kyung’s drive to prove that Ui-Jin did not take his own life is less important to her than other people’s ideas, or more specifically their emotions, their reactions. She is very motivated by what they tell her is being said online; she looks for herself; she even goes to Ui-Jin’s apartment. So is she trying to crack this case, or something else? Behaviour previously presented to us as bizarre when coming from Young-hwan, now shifts towards Sun Kyung – she’s not wild-eyed, she’s not histrionic, but her responses, her priorities; they seem off.
The Woman is full of narrative gaps; there’s more gap than narrative in some key respects, and the film feels like a deeply uncertain, often disorientating experience. In this respect, you cling all the more to what you can glean. Without a script which expounds everything or a crystal-clear timeline which explains everything, you come to rely on a facial expression here or there, or the reaction of a minor character who seems to know Sun Kyung, somehow, from some past we are never privy to. This certainly shifts your sympathies, and the film becomes maddeningly cruel in places as those sympathies move, but again, nothing moves so far or so clearly that you can feel you have a full understanding of characters or their motives.
The wider world of the film touches on crime – sometimes horrific, brutal crime – but at a remove. We see it, again, through the facial expressions of those who see it for us, or we see it refracted through the lowest of the low gossip and true crime message-boards online, full of confirmation bias and flippant interest. As a small tragedy consumes the lives of people in this small corner of Korea, the bigger picture seems to be how people seek meaning in all of this. There are only minor hints of people’s fears or regrets; as far as Sun Kyung goes, she hangs onto nearly all of her own secrets and busies herself on the periphery of other people’s lives. This is a film about peripheral people; some of them find a way through, and some do not. She seems able to cope with her occasional flashes of past regrets, if that’s indeed what we’re seeing.
The end result here is an unusual film, to say the least, but it’s strangely compelling. Han Hye-Ji plays the ambiguous Sun Kyung very well, never giving more than the role requires. She invites you to wonder at all the house moves, the new jobs, the guarded welcome from her old friends – but never clears up all of the doubts and loose ends. It’s a tense, fraught experience, which uses a neat structural reveal at the end to show us how little we’ve really learned about anything going on here – whilst at the same time developing a new, cynical sense of the bigger picture. This is clever directing by Hwang Wook.
The Woman (2025) featured at the Fantasia International Film Festival on 26th July.
There have been more than a few social media-themed films in recent years, which is entirely to be expected: in modern life, there’s a widening schism between people who see the constant creep of content creation as quite normal, and those weirded out by such a seismic shift in how people conduct their lives (and make their money). To date, though, even the horror films about this phenomenon have tended more towards realism, albeit a realism which seems improbable or odd to many. Headcase (2025) is the leap forward we’ve been waiting for, blending those same recognisable pressures and concerns with something more fantastical. The result is bloodier, funnier and more provocative, without ever losing sight of the bigger picture.
As the film starts, we’re immediately presented with clear evidence of the disconnect between the groups of people identified above; there’s a girl dancing around for a livestream, her phone on a tripod, getting in the way of a fellow pedestrian just trying to use the footpath without catching a flailing arm in the eye. We also hear a voicemail, this time being left for our protagonist, asking her for a call back – if she can fit it in around her content creation, of course, which her mother, making the call, admits she doesn’t fully ‘get’. The content creator in question is Kylie (Siobhan Connors). Kylie’s real name is Karen, and the film trusts us to understand why that wouldn’t be a great name for a successful influencer. We stick with Kylie, who – taking a phone call at the wheel – accidentally strikes and kills someone.
She’s horrified, but her phone’s always ringing, and this time when she picks up, she finds out that her agent has arranged a potentially career-making meeting that evening with a potential new brand partner. Kylie has to choose between dealing with this tragic situation properly, or mining it, too, for clicks and going to the meeting anyway – a meeting which could take her earning power sky-high. Unlike the first person we see in this film, Kylie’s thing is mental health. Everyone loves a mental health journey, right? And what could be more triggering than ‘discovering’ a severed (oh – severed now?) head?
You’d be forgiven for thinking that a dead body in the road would be as low – and as grisly – as Kylie’s day could get, then you’d be forgiven for thinking she’d gone that extra bit too far but surely that would be it, but the film really kicks into a higher gear when the content itself fights back.
Headcase doesn’t play around with its central message, opting for a bold and overt approach whereby there ends up a dialogue between content creator and content. It’s grisly and comedic as well as deliberately challenging and discomfiting, but there’s solid storytelling here too, with solid twists and turns across the film’s runtime. Whilst there are some shades, in places, of Dans Ma Peau (the horrors of a workplace meeting falling apart) and even a nod to Joker in one spot, what Headcase does brilliantly is to tease apart two competing strands: the genuine experience of mental health problems, and the representation – or even exploitation – of mental health discourse on social media.
The film is well-versed in the correct parlance: the ‘mental health journey’, trauma, PTSD, and also in how you need to regularly declare your conditions to keep the clicks coming. It’s a popular, often simplistic approach to mental health management which is often at best a disservice and at worst a real source of harm to those who may prefer to handle things differently. Not for nothing does Kylie stop off to cry-act into her phone about her new trauma; it’s part of her brand, and it’s a balancing act which even she gets wrong at the dinner table, with disastrous results. But the film makes you wonder: even without this crisis, how long could she have kept up the discourse before the very real cracks started to form? Headcase combines moments of brutal horror with an often funny, grotesque but recognisable central narrative, following someone for whom the need for attention overtakes all other considerations.
Headcase featured on 26th July at this year’s Fantasia Film Festival.
We aren’t privy to whatever horrors are taking place right at the start of Hellcat (2025) – though we hear enough, and then we follow a beaten-up but homely trailer – with a woman locked inside – which now seems to be travelling with some urgency along a long, deserted road. The young woman (Dakota Gorman) has an injury; however, something else we quickly glean is that her memory is faulty, so she can’t account for her current condition. She starts to explore her current environs with a view to escape, but before she’s able to get out, she suddenly hears a voice.
Through the trailer’s speakers, a man explains to her that he’s the one who’s locked her back there, but only because he wants to help her. He tells her, without any further details, that she has been ‘infected’, leaving her with only an hour or less to get medical help, or else nothing can be done to save her. The woman attempts to verify what he’s saying – there is, in fact, some evidence for his claims – but the power imbalance here is such that she remains paranoid, mistrustful. This is not helped by the fact that the man – who gives his name as Clive (Todd Terry) – can hear and see her, and everything he goes on to reveal complicates things: can his version of events be trusted? At this point, Lena is dealing only with a voice; like Lena, we too must decide whether, and what to accept. It’s vital for her that she is able to piece together what brought her to this point.
Hellcat doles out its truths, half-truths and lies very carefully, sustaining its initial gut-punch of tension whilst steadily creating more. It adds in more horror elements as it unfolds, though for a while it feels as if the film could go in a number of different horror directions – and it’s in this phase that Hellcat is really at its strongest. At this early point, all you can really feel sure is that things are going to get worse. The perpetual forwards motion of the trailer adds to this somehow – this sense of a literally unstoppable journey – but the film is equally (and quite surprisingly) colourful and rich, with clever, blended flashback sequences which bring old memories into the trailer, doing a great deal with the limited space in which most of the film plays out. Minor surreal touches and knowing nods to other ideas work well, too. What the film opts to include and what it opts to omit also displays careful understanding of how to work within the restrictions of a low-budget film, without sacrificing its strengths.
Dakota Gorman, as Lena, has to sustain the bulk of the film as the only actor on screen, and she does so very effectively. She’s no feckless, screaming victim; she works hard to orientate herself in this hostile new environment, and it’s also made clear that she is reckoning with a raft of traumatic prior experiences, and that these have shaped her. She is defiant and resourceful. Equally, Todd Terry has to foster this fear and defiance whilst being off-camera for the most part; it’s an immense ask for any actor, but he does a great job. There’s an element of a battle of wills between a young woman and an older, unknown man here, and if the film particularly resembles another then it’s 10 Cloverfield Lane: there’s a similar power struggle, a similar, possibly pseudo-paternal relationship and talk of some dark force outside, threatening harm. However, in Hellcat, the locus of the threat is the girl’s own body, which changes the dynamics significantly. There’s still a mystery here to unpick, but no sense that Lena can escape whatever is going on in any simple sense.
Whilst the first half of the film is the most assured, and some questions occur around the hour mark as to how things are going to resolve themselves, then the let-up is only brief and any missteps here are rare. Hellcat both fosters a sense of continuity with its horror roots, and also creates a fresh-feeling story. With its shifting sympathies and its nightmarish repurposing of liminal Americana, this is a carefully-plotted, economical and gripping tale.
Hellcat (2025) received its world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival on Friday, July 25th.
What do we expect from a film emblazoned with a title like Fucktoys (2025)? – Something quite specific? Something more abstract? Extreme? Funny? Brutal? Actually, all of those descriptors could fit the bill, either in turn or in a more layered sense; this is such a rich and engaging, if always irreverent and often challenging piece of film.
We start with a girl, a nameless girl but for the initials AP (also director/writer Annapurna Sriram). As she’s revealing to a local psychic and tarot reader, she’s not had an easy life so far, but things feel ever more oppressive of late, right down to her losing a tooth recently: this feels symbolic. What is going on? Hopefully a reading can reveal all. As the cards appear, it becomes clearer, sort of: someone has “cursed the shit” out of our protagonist. It can be ritually lifted, but the tarot reader warns her, kindly but in no uncertain terms, that it’ll cost a thousand dollars to get it done.
That sort of money will take some raising, so AP heads out of the bayou (the film was shot in and around Louisiana) and into the big city (actually a place lovingly called Trashtown, variously a landscape pockmarked with damage and ruin, or the outskirts of a down-at-heel urban space). She plans to raise the money through sex work; we first see her with a submissive client, locked in the bathroom of what looks like a punk squat. In pursuit of anyone who might need to actually ‘use’ the bathroom – her client is still in there, so I’ll leave it your imagination why she might need someone with a full bladder – she runs into an old flame, otherwise referred to as her ‘twin flame’, Danni (Sadie Scott), fresh from a bare-knuckle fight (and not her last). Just prior to a highly unorthodox police raid, they flee the house on our girl’s moped. Clearly these are two people with a close and loving bond who then go on to divide their time between earning, spending, partying and struggling through various faux pas, with one biggie reserved for the very last.
Even though Fucktoys has an undeniably dark subtext, with its more overt darkness steadily starting to seep through as the runtime extends, much of the film feels almost impossibly warm and vibrant, despite all this. Clearly a paean to John Waters, the film is filled with gaudy, kitsch places, larger-than-life characters and a heady kind of anti-establishment charm. Trashtown itself is a bizarre fever-dream slice of Americana, gritty but delirious: it’s the perfect backdrop to our girl’s journey, and fits into the film almost as a character in its own right, so that it’s only when our characters leave Trashtown that the more abundant horrors of their situation can make themselves most felt.
Significant also is the limited sense of time in the film: bar one gaudy flip-phone, this could be anywhere between the late Seventies and now, but the film’s soft Super-16 grain and lush colour palette feels much more retro than contemporary. One of the film’s characters, commenting on the attitude necessary to thrive as a party girl-come-sex worker, describes a “spirit of abundance”: this could just as easily describe the style and ethos of the film as a whole, as it never feels anything short of lavish, even in its grimmest moments. Lots of this Fool’s Progress raises a smile, and it’s important to note that the characters smile a lot, too, though whether this is because they are genuinely happy or simply immured against the worst aspects of their lives is open to debate.
It’s also interesting that the film is punctuated by two, opposing sets of characters. One one hand we have a steady array of psychic mediums, regularly blurring the line between real and unreal, veritas and camp, and bound together by the spectre of this “big sexy curse” which our girl is desperate to end. On the other hand, we have the streetcleaners, kitted out in hazmat suits in this universe, deep-cleaning the film’s outermost edges against some unspecified, but potentially harmful filth which we never hear more about. These are two extremes, it seems, presented alongside one another, symbols of the vast differences at play in the world of the film. It’s a spiritual battle not to discuss ‘liminality’ at this juncture, but rarely has a film come along which calls for that term more.
Fucktoys sends itself up regularly, but it’s never vicious to its characters and, regardless of its explicit subject matter, it’s surprisingly gentle, with a female-focused perspective throughout. That allows us to see the undeniable brutality of an uncertain, perfunctory and transactional lifestyle without any proselytising, and the film is able to keep hold of its dreamy, oddball atmosphere, only exposing its sharpest edges at key moments, and letting things come to a worthily strange close under that blue bayou sky. Wherever writer, director and star Sriram goes next, it feels nicely inevitable that it’ll be someplace just as mesmeric and ambiguous as this. This really is a great piece of work.
Fucktoys (2025) appeared at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 22nd.
Rob Zombie’s very first foray into cinema is, and was, everything you’d expect a Rob Zombie feature to be. House of 1000 Corpses(2003) is somewhere between an homage to the weirdest low-budget horror of the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties that Zombie clearly loves, and a Rob Zombie promo video – heavy on the aesthetics and the sense of retro sideshow spectacle. It remains divisive, but overall it’s an enjoyable horror spectacle which made its mark. But, in just a couple of years, Zombie’s approach and style was to change dramatically – as he addressed at the time, saying that he approached The Devil’s Rejectsas a brand new project with new characters and a new vibe, rather than thinking of it as a straightforward sequel. As The Devil’s Rejects opens, it’s clear indeed that the sideshow is closed. I quite like the idea that the same characters are just undergoing something very different here, though. Things are different; Halloween is over. In The Devil’s Rejects, when Baby’s eyes snap open, the dreamscape of House of 1000 Corpses disappears for good.
In the blistering Texas sun which opens the second film, there’s definitely a ‘morning after the night before’ feel, even though there’s still a sense that it’s been business as usual for the Firefly family who we last saw making corpse tableaux in the first film, however long exactly the interval has been. Again, we see signs of horrific violence which has taken place at the ranch, but this time, it feels past tense somehow. Otis may be cuddled up to some putrefying remains, but we’re looking at the aftermath here, not the deed – at least, so far. The ‘house of horrors’ motif isn’t central this time, as the family are going to need to flee this place under duress. The signs are clear: this film is going to be leaner, meaner and harsher – but there will be power struggles out there in the big bad world. We certainly start that way: The Devil’s Rejects starts and ends with a shootout, precipitated in each case by the Texas police. Guns didn’t figure quite so prominently in House of 1000 Corpses, but they do here, as described memorably by Mama Firefly: “there’s a million fucking cops” outside, and they are all armed. This development offers a kind of instantaneous rough justice, evidence of the powers that be reasserting themselves; later, we get vigilante justice, which blurs the line between legitimate and criminal all over again.
“I’m sorry sheriff, but you ain’t getting me…”
If we were ever intended to really sympathise with the unfortunate kids whose paths crossed first with Baby and then with the rest of her kin in House of 1000 Corpses, and that still feels like a maybe, then our loyalties perhaps much more easily come to rest with the besieged Firefly family in The Devil’s Rejects; like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, we know these people are appalling, but the powers-that-be are no better, even if it takes time, turmoil and trauma to turn Officer Wydell into a monster. As vile as they undoubtedly are, we feel for the family here. As in good Westerns – and arguably, if we’re talking genre, The Devil’s Rejects is a horror Western, and Zombie has said as much – neither protagonists or antagonists are clear-cut goodies or baddies, though we will likely feel some sympathy for the devil before we’re done. Reality is about to force its way in, and as the bullets spray, the version of the family we have come to know also fractures, though we are about to lose a mother and gain a father.
Forging the link between the garish Captain Spaulding clown show of the first film and the family is, by the way, neatly done here. Captain Spaulding is daddy, and Baby calls him for help as soon as it’s clear that the shit is hitting the fan: they always planned for this. As for Mama – ably played here by Leslie Easterbrook (ironically enough, probably best known for Police Academy) rather than by Karen Black (who declined to reprise her role for salary reasons), she’s fully prepared to end her life rather than submit to arrest, and it’s a moment in the film where want of bullets is as plot-relevant as copious gunfire. Mama gets taken, Rufus is dead and the kids (Otis and Baby, with Tiny MIA) have lost their mother, for what turns out to be for good.
As for Otis and Baby, who successfully link up with Spaulding at a local motel, this is the start of a journey through the darkest fringes of Americana, and arguably, a lot of newer, younger filmmakers picked up a lot of cues from The Devil’s Rejects on how to explore the same kinds of Americana – even if they don’t feel they have been specifically influenced by it, oh they have. The motels, the ranches, the ice-cream stands… The Devil’s Rejects, in turn, was of course itself influenced by a number of titles, and the fact that it nails its colours so squarely to the mast by giving a specific date for its start point (May 18th 1978, a year rife with serial killers) links it not only to horror films of the decade – as much as Zombie deliberately avoided even discussing horror with his crew – but also road movies and again, Westerns. The pitstops are vitally important, and they afford Zombie time and space to play with his favourite trashy aesthetics – as well as providing the film with the bulk of its horror content (which is in there, clear to see) but much of the film is devoted to the open road. There are hints of titles like Duel (1971) in here, alongside the more obvious nods to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and similar. The film has a feeling of a deranged odyssey, punctuated by moments of horrific, indifferent cruelty. The overall blend of journey and horror can feel exhilarating as much as it feels unsettling. It’s a combination which works, in this horror-not-horror film which is going places.
“Boy, the next word that comes out of your mouth better be some brilliant fuckin’ Mark Twain shit, ’cause it’s definitely getting chiselled on your tombstone.”
This brings us, perhaps most clearly, to Otis Driftwood – adopted son to the Fireflys. His transformation is probably clearest of all across the two films, as here he has taken on a more worldly, cynical incarnation : there are no costumes this time and certainly no greasepaint, or any kind of artifice. He is what he is. The new Otis is just a grimy, gritty, murderous drifter with loyalty to only a few; it’s interesting too that a kind of origins myth has sprung up around Otis, appointing him a traumatic childhood which resembles that of Charles Manson (and one of Otis’s many killer lines also echoes something said by Manson acolyte Tex Watson, just for good measure). Certainly, Otis’s cruelty is unparalleled in the film. Of course he’s cruel in House of 1000 Corpses, but here, there’s a kind of easy-going cruelty which feels even more devastating. His treatment of Tommy Banjo, one of the hapless musicians from the motel, is casually sadistic, establishing just what, exactly, we can expect from him. He doesn’t just kill Tommy; he tells him his whole life has been a waste, and he tells him that he’s about to die, despite following all Otis’s instructions: how’s that for cruel? But he’s a character that’s oddly impossible to hate; that takes some doing, presenting audiences with a necrophile and mass murderer but giving him enough killer lines and kudos to still have him be an audience favourite. People love Sid Haig’s Captain Spaulding too, and he has a few great lines of his own (full credit to Zombie for giving the coulrophobes something to cry-laugh about) but it’s Otis who probably comes out on top. This is one of those roles which you can’t now imagine being played by anyone other than Bill Moseley, and it’s almost certainly Moseley’s most memorable character since Chop Top in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre II, a film where perhaps Moseley finessed his blend of family loyalty and a dedication to ultraviolence.
Still, Otis isn’t an omnipotent character here, and both he and Baby get trapped and tortured by Sheriff Wydell (the fantastic William Forsythe). For Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie), this development – where the family is eventually betrayed and caught by Wydell – gives her character new opportunities, allowing her for the first time to play the final girl – fleeing for her life, rather than simply reprising the cutesy-killer motif of the first film. The Devil’s Rejects gives Moon Zombie a great push as an actor, and prepped her for her first roles outside of the Firefly universe over the following years. The actor described being so wiped out by the torment scenes that she wasn’t able to just go on and shoot again the next day; that’s down to the emotional weight of the final girl scenes, but also, credit where credit’s due: Wydell the vigilante is a domineering, terrifying figure (and again, you can still sympathise with this newly-created monster).
This turnaround in the family’s fortune adds a huge amount of depth to the film, and makes the subsequent family reunion – as unorthodox as it is – feel valedictory. Throughout the film, the family’s cruelty is tempered not just by their memorable lines, but by the sense of the family as real people: bickering, impersonating one another, laughing, enjoying each other’s company. The ice-cream stop, as well as providing a moment of let-up after all the horrors which have come before, is a chance to see Baby and Otis genuinely behaving like siblings, with Spaulding as overseer (and of course the baby of the family gets her way). A raft of other great performers – such as Ken Foree, Danny Trejo and Brian Posehn, also add a great deal to the film, offering brutality and comedy by turns. Humour is incredibly important here, right down to the comic sobriquets used by the family, and all of the stop-offs and skits along the way. These wouldn’t work to the same extent in a straightforward slasher or similar, but in a road movie, there’s time and space for it. In fact, in the balance between skit and ultraviolence, there feels like a little Tarantino in places (or at least, similar vibes via both Zombie and Tarantino taking cues from similar Seventies titles).
Speaking of which: let’s talk about that soundtrack. A damn good soundtrack is something else beloved of Tarantino of course, and another example of overlap whereby with a great soundtrack, certain songs become associated with certain films forever. Think of Stuck in the Middle With You by Stealers Wheel, get Michael Madsen (RIP) about to memorably lose his shit in Reservoir Dogs (1992). Hear Free Bird by Lynyrd Skynyrd, and what tens of thousands of film fans now get is The Devil’s Rejects, all day. Who would ever have thought that a relatively benign rock track, perhaps better known as a tribute to the band who lost their lives, would end up wedded to a story of serial killers and police corruption? And yet, in its defiant phrase, ‘and this bird you will not change’, it fits the Firefly ethos perfectly: come what may, that’s exactly how they’ve lived, and now it’s how they’ll die (or at least, so it seemed at the time; surely another sequel was nowhere near Zombie’s mind at the point the credits rolled on The Devil’s Rejects). The at-first odd fit of some of these tracks (the film opens with an upbeat radio-friendly rock track by The Allman Brothers) is soon hammered into shape as the music’s newfound associations with events in the film shape up. Zombie is eminently capable of surprises in this field: later in his career, we have Lords of Salem soundtracked not by Satanic rock (the obvious choice) but by…The Velvet Underground, for one. But in The Devil’s Rejects OST, we also get honky-tonk and blues, so it’s not a one-fit project, but rather it has a late night radio vibe which takes us on a journey through a wider range of popular and lesser-known songs and genres. It’s the perfect accompaniment to the film we get, a turn of the radio dial as the road rolls on.
“I am the devil, and I am here to do the devil’s work…”
But perhaps the reason fans love The Devil’s Rejects so much is because we clearly get a filmmaker having a great time here, coming into his own in terms of his confidence and skills (which, for many, have never been surpassed) and uniting a knockout cast of genre film darlings. Sadly, since filming, many of those great characters are no longer with us: Matthew McGrory, playing Tiny, passed away shortly after the film’s initial release – making his defiant walk back into the ranch all the more poignant. Whilst not appearing in The Devil’s Rejects, it’s important to remember the late Karen Black did such sterling work creating the original character of Mama, and Sid Haig – whose health was failing by the time 3 From Hell was being filmed – could only partly reprise his amazing turn as Spaulding, after a long list of compelling genre film roles during his lifetime. But, for many, Haig is Captain Spaulding, and he clearly loved both the role and the armies of new fans whichg the role gave him. A cinematic universe and characters created by a ‘B’ movie cineaste, and played by people who clearly loved and respected what had been given to them – it’s rare you feel that so abundantly as you do here, and the energy and dynamism behind the shoot can be felt everywhere in the finished product.
It’s worth remembering that The Devil’s Rejects appeared during the high water mark of a number of New French Extremity titles which would finally peak and roll back with the quasi-philosophical Martyrs just a few years later; this was also the decade of Saw sequels, American-grown torture titles which upped the ante by devising ever more ingenious, twisted torments for its hapless participants. That’s not to diminish the storylines of either the French or the homespun horrors of the decade, but arguably their emphasis was very different, and for a while the road movie – and certainly anything approximating a Western – was not in the ascendant. This was the decade of The Grudge, not vigilante justice – which, at the time, made The Devil’s Rejects feel so fresh, a retro setting and retro influences but a very different-feeling narrative, one which stood out against its peers (and did relatively well financially as a result). Sure, there are some people tied to chairs – is it even a Noughties horror or anything close to horror without someone tied to a chair? – but here, it’s part of a steadily-intensifying vigilante justice story arc which repositions its characters and threatens a very different outcome for the story, shifting our loyalties, sympathies and opinions along the way. It belongs to its era, but yet it feels quite separate from it, which is another reason this title has aged so well. The Devil’s Rejects still feels bold and defiant.
Is The Devil’s Rejects for everyone? Of course not; good! It’s too cruel, even too crude for some audiences – and to trim this film down for certification took a great deal of work, with lots of the film’s worst excesses needing to hit the cutting room floor. But it’s whip-smart, strongly and confidently written, well acted and perhaps even surprisingly thoughtful, for a film in which someone runs around wearing a human skin for fun. It’s incredibly hard to believe twenty years has passed by since queuing up to see this on a summer’s day, and being absolutely blown away by it. The film remains a hugely significant part of Noughties horror, but it easily surpasses that and now feels timeless, which is a real testament to Rob Zombie at his absolute best as a director and writer. Genre-splicing, even genre-defining, cannily irreligious, drenched in brutality and shot through with easeful black humour, it’s a hell of a piece of work and it deserves the reputation which it enjoys amongst the fans for whom it was made.
It never feels like a negative to find there’s a new David Cronenberg film, and with a title and premise like The Shrouds (2024), hopes were bound to be high. Indeed, the main idea here is fascinating, blending Cronenberg’s love for body horror/bodily trauma with a potential source of existential debate, here about life and death itself. There’s no bigger idea to take on. However fascinating it is, though, it doesn’t quite go anywhere. This is a deeply frustrating film. A charitable take on this would be that it’s all deliberate, because grief itself is unending, but I’m not too sure. Every review seems to mention the director’s own bereavement (his wife died in 2017) and clearly, he has brought much of that experience to bear on his most recent project, but the final impression is of a narrative which didn’t quite know how to reconcile the central premise with something more significant. It’s more bosom-y than I’d expect for a film all about grief and loss, too, but we’ll get to that.
In the film, a somewhat bewildered Vincent Cassel plays Karsh Relikh, an entrepreneur who has revolutionised the relationship with the cemetery. Remember that the cemetery itself was a kind of revolution in how people – from the 19th Century onwards – related to death, offering a new kind of eternal rest beyond the cramped, unhealthy confines of the urban churchyard. The Shrouds – the cemetery itself is named that, because of course it is! – is owned by Karsh, whose big idea has been to integrate technology into the burial experience, so that people can now interface with their buried loved ones, using an app to watch them decay in real time. This has been made possible through a new form of shroud, which connects the body to outside world, scanning it and relaying the images either to phones or to a screen on the tombstone.
Here’s the first issue, as much as I am fully aware that this is a Cronenberg film and yes, this idea fits both with his creative means of seeing the world and his own reported wish when he lost his beloved wife that he, like Karsh, just wanted to lie down in the grave with her, such was the nature of his grief. He’s simply played out this wish here in a very Cronenbergian way, and he’s not the first either; medieval art through to John Keats through to any number of horror titles have pondered the decay process, just as, arguably, so have many of our best-known cinematic monsters. But wanting to patch into the grave in real time to see if grandma’s nose has fallen off or not? It’s a stretch, particularly against the otherwise very normal-seeming world against which the film at least begins to play out. Even the swish Shrouds restaurant doesn’t seem out of the question, as people will dine anywhere which gives them a good story to share, but the tech itself does.
However, given time and space, this could have moved from being an initially absurd, though intriguing, and obviously ghastly idea to being a more integrated one. It’s clear that there are moments meant to trigger an uncomfortable laugh (most of the script triggers the same response, but at first that’s fine, too). Beyond the engaging shock factor of Karsh taking a first date to look at his wife’s now skeletonised remains, however, the tech is used more as a means to justify other, semi-realised plot points. This is a shame, because there are some great scenes, reveals and ideas during the first part of the film. These make you remember that David Cronenberg is in his eighties; it’s a great thing that he’s still pulling projects together, even if they have been wildly variable in quality for quite a few years.
Little wonder we see so little of the shrouds technology working, though. Just as Karsh is on the verge of selling his idea to other countries, there’s an attack on his flagship cemetery: data is stolen, and the stones themselves are badly damaged. Fearing a run of bad publicity, Karsh has to work fast both to repair his cemetery, and to find out who could have done this; what do they want? Are they religious? Environmentalists? Are they grieving and angry? Is it a personal vendetta against him? He wonders if it can have something to do with the odd nodule-type structures he recently noticed on his wife’s bones, during an enjoyable few moments of really getting in there to peer at her skull. Those chilly spring evenings must just fly!
That’s another of the films odd sticking points, though: Karsh’s love for his wife relates to her again and again as a body; his memories of her give way to dreams in which she’s always naked (he doesn’t seem to own a photograph of the woman clothed, either) and a lot of his angst in the here-and-now is to do with his ailing libido. Just when it seems he’s condemned to only ever experience sex in dreams where bits of his wife’s body disappear (or – in the film’s only real shock – break) he manages to bag not one, but two lovers: his wife’s sister Terry (Diane Kruger), who gets hot over conspiracy theories (lucky woman then, these days) and a sight-impaired Korean woman, Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt) whose own techbro partner has no interest in her sexually, because he, too, is chronically ill. There’s a lot of oddly perfunctory sex in this film, and a surfeit of boobs, even though Cassel’s modesty is largely preserved, largely because he’s blocked by boobs.
This is all something of a distraction, this midlife sexual reawakening, as he still needs to find out what the hell has been going on at his cemetery. Luckily he has ex-brother in law and top programmer Maury (Guy Pearce) to help him get to the bottom of it. Maury has also helpfully programmed an AI personal assistant for Karsh too; it goes by the name of Hunny, and yes, the avatar gets nude. It’s that, or it turns into a koala. As Karsh thinks back over his relationship with his wife, he recalls that an old flame of hers actually turned out to be her oncologist when she fell ill. Clear conflict of interests? Nope – Karsh is simply jealous that the doctor in question ‘had her body’ before him. Devoid of any deeper resonances, this just feels reductive in the sense of not knowing where to go with it all. Sex and death can be linked, sure – but is this it?
If that all sounds garbled, then I’m afraid it’s because it is. Eroticised explorations of death (and by extension, mourning) are long established; the role of technology in modern society is often debated in film; any sense of a conspiracy offers the possibility of a mystery. The Shrouds is certainly ambitious and tries to bring all of those together, but not successfully. You can ask an audience to accept one absolutely batshit idea; the rest of the story has to have features and ideas we’d recognise in a world where people can’t gawp at their decomposing loved ones. Hunny (also voiced by Kruger) is a bit of an embarrassment; it makes me think of older relatives who are really pleased they know how to work WhatsApp; technology changes so rapidly, you really need to bring someone in on these kinds of inclusions who can advise whether it’s suitable or not.
Suggestions of bigger forces who want the shroud tech aren’t really delineated or seen through to any sort of a conclusion, but there’s enough said to make the audience wonder: why? Why would anyone want to hack static underground cameras? The technology already exists above ground. That’s not a spoiler, by the way, as it doesn’t really go further than wondering whether competing totalitarian regimes are behind the cemetery attack, and after two hours of rather thin plot development, The Shrouds doesn’t provide satisfying answers, opting instead for a rather glib and confusing ending. It’s a shame, because there are some slivers of promise along the way, and yeah, perhaps seminal filmmakers are held to a harsher account than many others, but sadly this film is just not able to pass muster, whoever made it – or why.
The Shrouds (2024) is on a limited UK cinematic release now.
Whilst it’s rare to start a review with as-yet unqualified praise, needs must in this case: Terrestrial (2025) is such an incredibly clever, ambitious project. This tale for our times is filled with surprises, and it’s a huge credit to director Steve Pink and to writers Connor Diedrich and – good name for a writer – Samuel Johnson, that those surprises keep on coming. Don’t be fooled by the title, or the opening scenes: science fiction is incredibly important to Terrestrial, but our film is steadfastly grounded in the real world, despite the fact that we start by seeing some clips from a retro sci-fi film called The Neptune Cycle, before panning back to see a roomful of Neptune Cycle memorabilia: the film is playing in what seems to be a room dedicated to the book and film. We’re obviously dealing with a fan, but something traumatic has clearly happened in this house: there’s blood and glass everywhere, and our protagonist Allen (Jermaine Fowler) is all alone amongst it: we can’t yet see if he’s hurt, or where, but there’s a fractured timeline coming: we step back in time, meeting three of Allen’s old friends, newly engaged couple Maddie (Pauline Chalamet) and Ryan (James Morosini) and Vic (Edy Modica), who are on their way to Allen’s new place.
It’s clearly been a while since they last got together, so the impromptu visit is about to turn into a celebration of Allen’s recent good fortune. He’s now a successful author, or at least he has a very lucrative book deal nailed down; he has a big house (which we’ve already seen), a vintage car, and everything is seemingly going his way. Yet, before the car pulls up, Allen’s friends are expressing some concerns about his wellbeing; the fact that he’s now wealthy hasn’t assuaged those worries, and to be fair, when we catch up with Allen, he does seem a little…off. This impression is extended by the clever audience positioned achieved by the camerawork in the film, which allows us to see a little more – but not much more – than Allen’s guests. We don’t follow him everywhere, but we see that something is on his mind, and he’s behaving nervously.
There’s plenty on the guests’ minds, too. Sure, the drink starts flowing and these people, who were once so close, get the chance to talk over what’s been going on in each of their lives, but with Ryan in particular there’s a level of cynicism about Allen’s new life. Yes, authors can do amazingly well, but Allen, already? Can he really have gone from zero to hero so quickly? Can he really be doing everything he claims? This seed of doubt soon extends to the house itself; Allen isn’t great at excusing where he’s going or what he’s doing, either, as he keeps absenting himself and making excuses. However, things are about to get a whole lot stranger…
Whilst Terrestrial does signpost – fairly clearly – that something isn’t right here, it doesn’t give the game away as to what this might be (and as a reviewer, it’s really enjoyable to be sent down the wrong path from time to time, as happened here). Rather, the film is clear that there’s a mystery, but unfolds the mystery in a sequence of smart, complex ways. This isn’t just a film which starts midway along, backfills and moves past the start point to a predictable ending – far from it. There are overlapping timelines, but it’s rare to see them brought together so skilfully. A lot of the credit for this must go to Jermaine Fowler in the lead role: what he isn’t saying is always as important as what he is saying, but whether explaining himself or otherwise, he’s an incredibly magnetic character. His hypervigilance is well counterbalanced by his friends’ interested, but somewhat detached reactions to his new crazy. The narrative then expands around this group of people, adding in other, sometimes shock complications and achieving some impressive world-building, too.
As such, the inclusion of science fiction is really interesting here. Once again, Terrestrial is not a science fiction film, but sci-fi provides context for everything that happens, particularly with regards to the act of writing itself. Writing can be aspirational, and for a select few people, it’s immensely lucrative. In other ways, though, any writing – even sci-fi – can be simply a means to an end, but it just so happens that sci-fi, with its utopias and its escapism, offers the ultimate contrast to the very worldly concerns of modern creators, fighting either to survive or to thrive right here and right now, in a very real world which is growing less and less inclined to reward creatives. This alone makes the title Terrestrial such a suitable one. But sci-fi is a big part of Allen’s personal story, too: The Neptune Cycle, with its ultimate fantasy of being ‘chosen’ by a higher power, informs so much about him. Self-perception is a key idea in the film, and this is the case throughout Ryan’s invasive questions, or the old friend group’s somewhat competitive attitude towards Allen: after all, everyone wants to be getting on, getting ahead.
An exhilarating, tangled web of deception, double-crossing and questioning, it wouldn’t do to say too much more about this title. This makes it slightly tricky to review, but if a review is at least partly there to help people decide whether to see a film or not, then I hope this one has said enough to make people want to watch. Go in with as few preconceptions as possible, and just allow this creative, humane, modern moral tale to do its thing.
Terrestrial (2025) received its world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival on July 20th.
Zombies are a lot harder to come by these days than they used to be. What gives? Despite big hitters like Army of the Dead a few years ago, we just see fewer zombies than we used to. Once upon a time, indie filmmakers went for the zombie genre almost by default. Sometimes, I yearn for the good old days, when low budget directors enrolled all their friends as extras, ensuring they dressed in white to show off all the fake blood to its best. Perhaps things are changing, though. For one, Tina Romero – yes, daughter of George A. – has just entered the fray with a zombie film of her own, and at some point, we might be clear of the Covid projects which, due to other restrictions, attempted to conjure philosophical quandaries, not brain-eaters.
ZombieCON Vol. 1 is, funnily enough, a little bit of both of these. It is a zombie film, but the origins of its zombie outbreak are unusual, and this element is quite probably the film’s best idea. (A little confusingly, by the way, the title appears on IMDb twice, but unless director Kyle Valle has painstakingly remade his film frame by frame, Michael Haneke style, I think we can assume they’re one and the same.)
Here’s the general idea: via a brief voiceover from one of the film’s lead characters, Rocky (Manny Luke), he explains something very important to him and his friends: cosplay. His team – called Rockets Rockets – like nothing better than planning costumes, dressing up and attending conventions, and there’s no bigger or better con than AnimeCon West, the highlight of their year.
It’s not all plain sailing, though, and there’s plenty of rivalry between the different cosplay teams, particularly over who performs best at various choreographed routines performed on stage. (Is this a thing? I’ve never been.) Outside of the con venue, normies are very clearly presented as intolerant, spiteful dicks who see no value in the pursuits enjoyed by these ‘weirdos’: this possibly plays on the fears, and/or the experiences of kooky kids the world over, and there’s a touch of the teen drama about this early part of the film, as well as clear links to comic culture – which feels a little overextensive, but fits in with the central premise, as well as the title.
So where do the zombies come in? That is an interesting one: in this universe, becoming a mindless, gut-ripping monster is dependent on that person’s behaviour. Not quite the indiscriminate outbreak of lore, the people who ‘turn’ in this universe (after a slightly bizarre initiatory event) are the ones we’ve already established are pretty bloody dreadful anyway: anyone who behaves like an arsehole could become a zombie. That doesn’t necessarily mean, by the way, that all of the cosplayers are inherently more tolerant, positive or trustworthy; some people within fandom have negative traits, too. Hatching a plan to cross LA to rescue Rocky’s mom (have you ever noticed that people’s mothers are usually a lot better off without the help?) Rocket Rocket arm up with the as-yet decorative collectible katanas which of course they have around the place, and off they go.
This is clearly a passion project and this is clear through the way the cast gives it their all, enjoying what they’re doing. It doesn’t laugh at cosplayers but laughs with them, perhaps, as it doesn’t take its initial set-up hugely seriously, having fun with it instead, and the film keeps our eye squarely on Rocky and the gang as our de facto heroes. There are issues with any project so constrained by budget, however: there are a lot of sound issues in the early part of the film, and a good boom mike could have sorted out that echoing. This is small fry, however, compared to the fact that the film lingers a little unnecessarily over its character- and world-building, particularly in the first third or so of the film, leading to an extended runtime overall which doesn’t contribute much to the film overall. Still, once the zombie idea comes into play, there’s a decent amount of SFX effects, even if the team couldn’t go as far with the zombie makeup as they probably wanted. You can see that in how they bookend the zombie ‘section’ of the screenplay, with a big gory effect at the beginning, and then a lot put by for the big finale.
In a nutshell, then: there are noticeable constraints and a few issues with ZombieCON Vol. 1, many of them budgetary, some of them more to do with plot and pace. However, there’s a lot of positivity too, and you can give credit for the ideas and the ambition shown here. Whilst this film isn’t quite the big zombie comeback the world wants and needs, it is a likeable and aspiring indie film and it’s highly likely that its cosplayer subject matter will make it particularly interesting to that element of the demographic, whose fantasy fandoms often ask them to ponder the ‘what ifs?’.
ZombieCON Vol. 1 (2024) is now available on Fandango and Apple TV.
