Intensity: 🩸🩸🩸out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
In Redux Redux, a vengeful mother engages in a multiverse-hopping vendetta to exact justice on a serial killer who murdered her daughter. She hopes that in one of the alternate universes, she will find a world where her daughter is still alive. An interesting take, if a bit over-extended, on the causality loop of fate.
Intensity: 🩸🩸out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
How far will you go to protect your children from poor decision-making? Hallow Road hits the streets as a one-room black box stage thriller set in an automobile. Two parents race to the scene of an accident involving their daughter, as panic sets in and additional levels of tragedy are revealed. This movie will put you through the emotional wringer and has some cryptic plot twists hiding in the shadows.
Intensity: 🩸🩸🩸out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
The post-apocalyptic Canadian survival tale 40 Acres is a savage and emotional story that tests the boundaries of Darwinian society at the brink. In the end, when countries and governments fail, the family unit survives. This movie has increased prominence due to the current tensions between Canada and the US. The sense of dread only increases when the plausibility factor of this story has increased tenfold in recent months. The plot mirrors a thrilling opening scene with a devastating closing act, which stacks the deck heavily against our protagonists. Pulses will pound.
Intensity 🩸🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
The stakes are as high as the coke-snorting estate agent protagonist in director Gerard Johnson’s suspenseful thriller ODYSSEY.
Intensity: 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
The Gorge is the ultimate mash-up film. Science fiction, romance, war, and horror are all bottled into one package. What The Gorge does best is character building. Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller have real star power and great chemistry. The action sequences rock, with great choreography and impressive production values. The monsters, though, are a mixed bag and are window-dressing MacGuffins to the main event, romance.
Intensity: 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Companion is one big love triangle. Literally and figuratively. It deftly balances a series of human and non-human relationships, while at the same time trying to thread a very delicate needle between comedy, horror, and the sci-fi thriller genres.
Intensity: 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Here for Blood mixes wrestling suplexes and a murderous KISS-like death cult with a babysitting plot. Surprisingly, the movie pulls it off. The movie's action pounds through the plot with splattery glee and aplomb. Moreover, the unlikely partnership between hulking Shawn Roberts and 10-year-old Maya Miseljevic is pure magic.
Intensity: 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
When the world begins to fall apart, civilizations do some pretty crazy shit. Caitlin Cronenberg's first feature film, Humane, explores the possibilities in this dark satire. The Canadian government offers compensation for voluntary euthanasia. A prominent and wealthy family patriarch intends to make a grand political, patriotic gesture, but it goes horribly, bloodily wrong.
A summoned creature. A history of genocide. A hotbed of disappearances. The sleepy little town of Newport's Valley has a lot going for it. Why not book a room at the Barn Owl Inn and see for yourself?
Intensity: 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Don't Move is a surprisingly tight and tense thriller that knows the story it wants to tell and keeps its focus. The result is a highly stressful viewing that keeps you calculating the odds in anticipation of escape from our heroine who spends a large portion of the movie paralyzed.
Intensity: 🩸 🩸 🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
There’s only question that needs to be asked about 2024’s remake of Speak No Evil. Why?
Intensity: 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Brimming with inventive promise, Never Let Go is a movie of half-moves that never resolves its post-apocalyptic and psychological horror concepts. Halle Berry tries her best, but it becomes a frustrating endeavor by its conclusion.
Intensity: 🩸 🩸 🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
This is the first horror film in 2025 that you can safely skip. To be clear, it’s a good looking production with a great soundtrack, but The Wolf Man is one of the poorest excuses for a werewolf you’ll ever lay your eyes on.
Intensity: 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
This one’s a real puzzler. On the one hand it’s a full-on gross-out B-movie, with questionable acting and an equally questionable plot. On the other hand Terrifier 3 is a real achievement. The gore is certainly like nothing you’ve ever seen before — unless you already watched Terrifier 1 and 2 -- and the mean-spirited depravity is something to behold. This is a film that would have Herschell Gordon Lewis, Tom Savini, and Lucio Fulci hunched over a stain-soaked toilet.
Intensity: 🩸.5 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Your Monster is that rare Horror Rom-Com that succeeds on multiple levels. It takes the breakup film and mashes it up with the Beauty and the Beast and Imaginary Friend tropes. And then it pours madness sauce on top. The comedy hits. The romance is likable and endearing. And, though it saves the horror for quite a long stretch, Your Monster eventually delivers a great coup de grace of horror.
Intensity: 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Nosferatu is a staggering accomplishment. Visually stunning, with sublime acting, Nosferatu is everything you would hope for in a horror costume drama. It helps that the director is the master of the period-piece horror movie.
Intensity: 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Blackout is a fair-to-middling werewolf movie. With much respect to horror Godfather Larry Fessenden, this movie struggles to get out of second gear. The werewolf makeup is effective, and there are some gory scares, but weak supporting characters and excessive exposition bogs down this effort.
Intensity 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
The Girl with the Needle is one of the darkest, most haunting, and most moving horror-adjacent films in recent memory.
Movies with no dialog. Are we calling this a trend now? It seems like making a movie isn't enough of a challenge for some folks so they're upping the ante and going speechless. Albeit with mixed results.