Tremors 3: Return to Perfection

 The Tremors movies were always low-budget, but this second sequel was the first one to go straight to video (Aftershocks was intended to be DtV as well, but positive reactions on test screenings convinced Universal to give it a theatrical run.

 And... well, this is where the magic fails. Maybe you can blame the script by newcomer John Whelpley, but the story is by the original Tremors team (S. S. Wilson, Brent Maddock plus Nancy Roberts, who helped with Tremors 2). Maddock also directs.

 Gun nut Burt Gummer (Michael Gross) is left to headline after the departures of Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward, and he is as likeable as ever, even if he's much better as a supporting character than a protagonist. And to be completely honest, I didn't hate the deuteragonists either: Shawn Christian as a grifter who takes out tourists on safaris to see "graboids" (or a shitty facsimile thereof), and a business-headed shop owner played by Susan Chuang.

 But the story, which has a new batch of graboids/shriekers terrify the community of Perfection again, feels very tired and by-the-numbers. So does the introduction of yet a new stage of graboid development - it turns out shriekers, if left alone, turn into a sleeker version of a shrieker that can fly by... lighting its farts on fire, basically. These ass-blasters (official name!) look terrible and their method of locomotion never makes sense (they don't look like they could glide for a second); The whole thing reeks of desperation on the part of the creative team.

They got Dark Horse to do a decent cover... shame no one thought about running a spell checker.

 Squint, and you can see some traces of the trademark Tremors wit - but you have to squint a lot, and none of it is really memorable. Add to that crappier production values (although technically on a higher budget; at one point we're treated to a rack of comics called "Shreikers") and more reliance on bargain-bin CGI even for the standard first-stage graboids... yeah, this was a major disappointment.

 This is as far as I got originally with this series. It hasn't gotten any better with a rewatch and, to be honest I'm not exactly making me want to persevere with the series; Especially as the relationship between the Tremors team and Universal, which never seems to have been good (Aftershocks' production was apparently nightmarish, which makes it even more amazing that it turned out so well) got markedly worse after this.

Hell Baby

 Fucking godawful. A ton of comedy talent (Keegan Michael Key! Kumail  Nanjiani! Rob Corddry! Plus a ton of members of comedy groups The State, Stella, and others) are completely wasted on a stoner-friendly horror spoof that relentlessly goes for easy jokes and lame improv comedy.

 Writer/directing team of Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon, who also make an appearance as two chain-smoking, hard-living exorcist priests, have come up with some jokes that do work on paper, such as Key's character, a ridiculous Cajun caricature with no sense of personal space or privacy, or some extended absurdist sequences where the film stops to stare at people sampling local Louisiana cuisine for uncomfortably long stretches of time. But the results are never more than mildly amusing, and they carry on for so long they almost inevitably overstay their welcome. And those are the better parts of the movie. Avoid, unless you actually enjoy this sort of Your Highness-style low-effort shit.

Things Will Be Different

 Siblings Joseph (Adam David Thompson) and Sidney (Riley Dandy) abscond to a safehouse after stealing some money. It's a particularly safe safehouse, too: By performing a ritual with the abandoned farmhouse's clocks, the fugitives can jump out of time into a sort of isolated time loop and wait out two weeks without any fear of anyone finding them.

 The catch (of course there's a catch) is that they're not supposed to be there. As Joseph and Sidney end their stay outside of time, they discover that the loop is run by a shady outfit which are unwilling to let them out. They give our protagonists an ultimatum: either get rid of another intruder who's been meddling with their timeloop, or get erased from existence. So the siblings are stuck, unable to return to their lives until they deal with a menace that may not exist.

 It's an original, compelling setup with well-written, likeable characters and some good tension. The biggest and most distinctive thing the movie has going for it, though, is its inscrutability - it's spelled out explicitly that some things will not be explained to the characters (and by extension, the audience). The plot does end up making sense, but only just about, and it leaves a lot up in the air. In that I don't think it's wholly successful, despite some clever ideas and a solid, emotional ending. Much better handled is the weirdness and sense of mystery behind the Vise, as the organization running the time loop calls itself.

 Writer/director Michael Felker has been filmmaker duo Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead's editor for more than a decade now (starting on their V/H/S segment; They produced the film through their Rustic films imprint, and Benson makes an appearance as one of the operators of the time loop.) Felker's chilly, quiet style complements the material well, and the soundtrack by Jimmy Lavalle (of the great post-rock band Tristeza - highly recommend their album En Nuestro Desafío) and Michael A. Muller is excellent.

Tremors 2: Aftershocks

  Tremors remains one of my favourite creature features ever - just about everything in that film is pitch perfect, starting with a wildly inventive script that's chock-full of clever ideas, amazing FX, great and extremely funny characters, not to mention the ways it keeps both its threats (tentacle-mouthed burrowing slugs that hunt by sound and vibration) and the ways they're dealt with fresh right  up to the very end.

 There's been something like six sequels since, and now there's possibly one more on the way - a legacy sequel with some of the surviving cast and control finally reverted to the original creators. I remain cautiously optimistic, despite the easy cynicism legacy sequels deserve at this late date (and the fact that the original team was also involved in the dreadful Tremors 3) - and the reason to keep faith is that the series' first direct-to-video sequel is honestly kind of amazing.

 After the events of Tremors, its protagonists made a bit of money and finally managed to leave their hard-scrabble life behind. Due to budget cuts the production wasn't able to hire Kevin Bacon, so his character Val (and love interest Reba McEntire) was summarily written out. Instead, the film rests on the shoulders of the great Fred Ward, returning as Earl. His graboid-hunting exploits have made him a minor celebrity, but he's blown his cash-in attempt on it in a failed ostrich farm.

 Cue the arrival of a mexican oil field executive, who explains he has a bit of a graboid infestation and offers $50,000 for each dead pest. Earl is reticent, but the money is too good, and soon he joins old friend and gun-nut Burt (Michael Gross), a geologist (Helen Shaver), a fresh-faced taxi driver and graboid hunting enthusiast (Christopher Gartin) and a small team at the site to hunt down the old tentacle slugs.

  The killing is easy at first, as the crew have graboid extermination almost down to a science. But this is a sequel, and the law of escalation pretty much dictates that there needs to be a different form of threat. In this case, it's the brood of the graboids - they birth clutches of some sort of rapidly-multiplying kangaroo-like creatures. There's a clear debt to Jurassic Park's raptors, but as with the original Tremors, the fun part is watching a very likeable cast use inventively the cards they're given... and sometimes make a bad situation worse. The script isn't quite as full of clever moments as the one for the first movie, but it does feature plenty, including some ridiculously funny jokes that also function to drive the plot (such as the way the crew discover just how much shit a full-metal slug can penetrate).

 The new creatures look great, with some amazing puppetry involved (they are CGI whenever they need to move a lot, and the FX work there - handled by Phil Tippet's studio - looks pretty good nearly twenty years later). Director S. S. Wilson (who co-wrote most of the early installments along with fellow series stalwart Brent Maddock, before Universal took the series away from them) isn't quite as good directing action as Ron Underwood was in the first film, but he handles himself well, has a real eye for filming great-looking earthy explosions, and the verdant scenery of the Mexico oil fields (actually shot in California) gives this one a distinct, attractive look. He also includes a lot of neat little visual details, such as the way a powerful gun's muzzle blast is actually strong enough to break a nearby window that's not on the path of fire.

 Tremors 2 is the rare, miraculous example of a direct-to-video movie that's a worthy follow-up to a true classic. It doesn't manage the neat trick of, say, Undisputed 2 of actually being better than the first movie, but... come on, it's Tremors we're talking about here. Let's not get greedy.

Vulcanizadora

 Two middle-aged friends to out into the woods. Derek (Joel Potrykus) is nerdy, juvenile, and seems to see the trip as an excuse to act like a twelve-year old. Marty (Joshua Burge), an arsonist who is about to be imprisoned, seems to be on some kind of mission, and barely tolerates Derek's antics.

 Vulcanizadora at first seems content to observe these man-children on their camping trip, charting their progress through the woods with a light touch and heavy slacker comedy vibes. But even before it pivots upon a grim turn and starts tracking its fallout in the film's back half, there are hints as to what's to come shot through Derek's childish up-beat chatter as he discusses his family life and how deeply let down he feels by life as an adult.

 The observational and character-based humour is pretty mild - there are a few laughs here and there, but  most of the comedy is of the cringe variety early on, evolving into some gallows humour and deeply ironic developments later on; It might technically qualify as a comedy, but this is pretty much the anti-Naked Gun.
 It's the drama that ends up being surprisingly effective; Produced on a shoestring budget, writer/director/coprotagonist Joel Potrykus keeps the tone extremely down-to-earth even as the stakes are pretty world-ending for his characters. Great film.

The Naked Gun (2025)

 Police Squad! is back, now featuring Frank Dreblin's son - conveniently named Frank Dreblin Jr. (Liam Neeson). Along with a femme fatale (Pamela Anderson), he gets tied into a ridiculous conspiracy against a tech bro played by Danny Huston. But the plot doesn't really matter - is it funny?

 Thankfully, it is. I guess I'd put it well below the original, and a little above the Naked Gun 2: The Smell of Fear; As directed by Akiva Schaffer (of Lonely Island fame) from a script by him plus Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, this new Naked Gun is a successful merging of his sensibilities (as in, for example, Popstar) and the original film's Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker maximalist approach.

 It does a pretty admirable job in matching the original's density of silly jokes, but for the most part it stages one joke and moves on to the next instead of packing in multiple gags in a single shot. Serial instead of parallel piss-takes. This has advantages and disadvantages, and gives the film a fairly distinct feel... but I did notice it didn't really achieve the vintage ZAZ effect of overwhelming you under the onslaught of jokes of varying quality - when a joke falls flat here, it flounders. And partly as a result of that, and of some weak sections, the film as a whole doesn't feel quite as memorable, as larger-than-life, as its forebears.

 Still: there are a lot of jokes, a lot of them very funny, and some of them featuring the sort of inventive boldness the ZAZ movies were known for. We get other people's inner dialogs butting into our hero's narration, ridiculous running gags that get increasingly ridiculous as they recur, an inspired montage-that-gets-out-of-control, and a really over-the-top final chase that manages to include a wonderful owl puppet. All that plus the expected quips, dad jokes, exaggerated bumbling, and visual double entenderes you might expect out of a modern comedy firmly situated on the sillier side of things. And it stays well away from the empty references - everything has a punchline. Good stuff.

 A few of the jokes acknowledge some of the concerns people might have about making a light-hearted movie about cops, but Dreblin's trespasses are all pretty minimal; It's as if the movie knows it needs to address it, but is desperate to return to a more goofy, harmless tone. I'm ok with that, even if it feels like a missed opportunity. Guess the 'keep the politics (I happen to disagree with) away from art' crowd will be happy.
 The same goes double with regards to the film's choice of villain - why make him a rich tech 'prophet' who owns a brand of electric cars and then completely decouple him from the obvious target? Both the reality of what the real-life enshittification gurus are pulling, and the all the depressingly lame evil shit Musk specifically has done? Is ripping off Kingsman really the best they could do?
 I feel like I'm over-analyzing a movie where the main character convincingly disguises himself as a tiny schoolgirl, but why call attention to how toothless your satire is? Just avoid real-life parallels in the first place, job's done.

 Neeson is an inspired bit of casting, and he and the rest of the cast attack their roles with the requisite seriousness, making their antics all the more funny. On the technical front, Schaffer has all the skills needed for good comedy: great blocking and crack timing; Other than that, between The Monkey and Weapons, horror comedies have regular comedies soundly beat on presentation. It's nowhere even near a contest.

Bring Her Back

 Two teen Siblings (Billy Barratt and Sora Wong) are assigned a foster home when their dad dies, only to find their new foster mom (Sally Hawkins) and creepy stepbrother (Jonah Wren Phillips) may not have their best interests at heart.

 Bring Her Back is a cruel, intense, and unsparing horror film. It represents a huge leap forward for writer/directors Danny and Michael Philippou, too, with much better-rounded characters and pitch-perfect execution of some rather nasty set-pieces and brilliantly sustained tension.

 The script is very well put together, too; The drama is compelling, and it avoids exposition while still handing us enough information that it's easy enough to put things together in a satisfying fashion. There are a ton of clever touches, up to and including the way it sets up Hawkins's character as a former counsellor - this both sets up her skill at manipulating the kids, as well as a possible source for a VHS tape that acts as a sort of catalyst for everything that's going on.

 Definitely in the running for the best horror movie I've seen this year; I seriously doubt any performances will top Hawkins and Barratt's, at the very least.

Asylum

  Asylum - or, to give it its full name, Asylum: Twisted Horror and Fantasy Tales, is a fairly dismal indie anthology film that features nine - count 'em, nine tales of very varying quality, plus a framing device in which a clown (Raymond E. Lee) delivers some painfully unfunny, grade-schooler level misanthropic (and misogynist, but that fits the character) invective at us that might or might not be related to the stories he's presenting.
 The shorts were sourced from all over the world by two Argentine producers (Nicolás Onnetti and Michael Kraetzer, and their attempts to tie everything together with their wraparound segments are a large part of why I'm overall negative on the film.

 There are two bright spots - One is Damien LeVeck's The Cleansing Hour, which presents a fake exorcist (Sam Jaeger) who runs into the real deal during a stream. If that sounds familiar, it's because Leveck managed to expand it into a (much better) feature a few years later.

 The other one is an extremely silly and gory surrealistic comedy by Caye Casas, who would almost a decade later later make The Coffee Table. It's the tale of a terminally ill henpecked man (Josep Maria Riera) who gets better just before the funeral, to the chagrin of his wife and his mother (Itziar Castro and Carme Sansa). It's camp as hell, and pretty fun.

 Other than that, a cheeky Mexican short takes the piss out of Trump's "let's build a wall on the border and make the Mexicans pay for it!" still unfulfilled campaign promise, complete with tiny crotch-mounted missile launcher half a decade before South Park made news making fun of the orange pussy-grabber's micropenis. It's a rauchy four-minute live-action (and CGI) cartoon that goes by mamón - that is, cocksucker. Guess who that's aimed at? It's a sentiment I'm sure a lot more people share these days.
 Besides that gleefully juvenile aside, there's not one, but two pretty cute zombie tales - one claymation, one live action. All these are decent enough.

 But then... there's the rest. The wraparound gets even unfunnier the longer it drags on, and seems to take great pride in going absolutely nowhere interesting. As for the other shorts... there's an incredibly basic slasher tale where all the effort is come up is spent making designing a 'cool' slasher, and next to no thought is given the incredibly basic story they put him in (that the killer looks like a slipknot robot... doesn't help things). There's a ripoff of the trippy fourth dimension flight part of 2001, and the butt-ugly 'epic' thematic conclusion to the wraparound where a bunch of clowns run amok in a fairground killing young people.

 There's some good stuff to be found here, but with the Cleansing Hour living on as its own thing, the bad sadly balances it out completely. I wouldn't really recommend this bloated mess to anyone except horror anthology completists.