Hello, everybody! It's been a while since I've shared a proper review of a 1980s slasher. Things have been real busy on my end, writing for Screen Rant full time and all. I have a tentative plan to get Census Bloodbath back up and running some point by spring 2025, but before then, please enjoy this review of a snowy slasher I watched as part of my duties at Horror Press.
Year: 1988 Director: Jeff Kwitney Cast: Debra De Liso, Doug Stevenson, Lisa Loring Run Time: 1 hour 26 minutes
Plot: In Iced, four years after their friend Jeff (Dan Smith of Hitcher in the Dark) dies in a skiing accident, a group of friends is invited to the swanky Snow Peak skiing community for a vacation. Isolated and surrounded by snow, they begin to be hunted by a killer wearing Jeff's cracked ski mask who blames them for the accident. Is it Jeff? Or is it someone else seeking revenge?
The characters in question are Cory (Doug Stevenson of The Prowler), whose braggadocio and stealing of Jeff's girlfriend caused Jeff to go angry-skiing during a storm in the first place; Trina (Debra De Liso of The Slumber Party Massacre), said former girlfriend and now wife of Cory, who is obsessed with exercise; pediatrician John (John C. Cooke); John's resentful wife Diane (Elizabeth Gorcey); Jeanette (Lisa Loring, the original onscreen Wednesday Addams, also of Blood Frenzy), their transparently desperate single friend who just had a blow-out fight with her dorky boyfriend Eddie (Michael Picardi); and Carl (Ron Kologie of Cards of Death), the requisite irritating prankster who has the additional character trait of being addicted to drugs, aided by his high-paying job at a pharmaceutical company. Also on hand is the allegedly hunky Snow Peak real estate agent Alex Bourne (Joseph Alan Johnson, who wrote Iced in addition to starring in Berserker and The Slumber Party Massacre), who is desperate to impress his father and who Jeanette immediately throws herself at.
Analysis: Unfortunately, like a lot of meat-and-potatoes slasher movies of the late 1980s, Iced does not have much to offer the seasoned horror fan. The acting ranges from competent (hi, Lisa Loring) to absolutely abysmal, averaging out much closer to abysmal than not. Joseph Alan Johnson in particular is a disastrously beige nonentity.
The movie’s pacing and structure are also baffling. There are almost no murders beyond the opening kill for a good half of Iced’s runtime, which forces you to spend time watching this group of people have a pretty mediocre ski vacation where they’re constantly sniping at one another and not doing much else. When the kills do come, they zip past you at a too-rapid clip, hardly giving you time to pay proper attention to them, like chocolates on the conveyor belt in I Love Lucy.
There is next to no tension-building in the movie because of this, just a lurching sort of stop-start motion that will make you seasick. By far the most exciting and visceral moment of the movie is a scene where a character is wandering around in the dark and bangs his shin on a coffee table. Tragically, the skiing is also not that thrilling to watch. While it’s competently shot, enough to be legible, it seems to be beyond the limits of director Jeff Kwitney to turn it into something propulsive and exciting. Thankfully, the movie pretty much forgets about skiing after the first act, anyway.
Although the sum of its parts is pure blandness, there is plenty that Iced does quite well. For instance, the movie was shot in Utah and thus comes by its iciness naturally (sorry, Jack Frost, California doesn’t quite cut it), crafting a unique setting for a late-period slasher with a frigid, moody atmosphere. I’m also a sucker for themed kills, and the use of a ski pole, an icicle, a snowplow, and a hot tub do a lot to spice up the proceedings.
For the gorehounds in the audience, only one of the kills is particularly bloody, though they are nearly all well-rendered by their own standards (there’s an electrocution that relies on performance rather than effects, for instance, and does stick the landing). And even the offscreen or underwhelming kills end up being useful in the Final Girl sequence, when their frozen bodies provide a gruesome and effectively bleak tableau.
As far as exploitation movies go, Iced also has quite a bit to offer on that front. Nearly every member of the cast takes off all their clothes at one point or another, chilliness be damned, and there is a reasonably equitable division of male and female characters wandering around bare-chested, which always feels shockingly progressive when you’re watching a 1980s slasher. Plus, the sequence that is the most undignified (a topless corpse is seen with snow piled on her breasts) actually works for the tone, as the indignity makes her death feel that much more tragic, while the piled snow emphasizes how impossibly long the character has been exposed to the elements.
What else is good? Well… The killer’s POV is depicted by showing a view through the crack’s in Jeff’s visor, which provides a neat new image for a type of shot that is otherwise pretty standard for a slasher movie.
However, Iced ultimately exists in this nether space between interesting and boring where it never particularly feels like a slog, but is oh so withholding when it comes to meting out exciting moments. I’ve seen dozens of slashers that are much, much worse, so it’s hard to get angry about what this 1988 entry is bringing to the table. That said, this one is only for die hard fans of the subgenre, or for people who desperately need a snowy horror fix and have already seen everything else from The Shining to Wind Chill.
Killer: Alex Bourne (Joseph Alan Johnson) Final Girl: Trina (Debra De Liso) Best Kill: John getting stabbed through the back of the neck with a ski pole while sitting in the car evokes Halloween in a fun way, is the best themed kill, and is also the most showstopping gore moment, simultaneously. Sign of the Times: A man who is supposed to be inconspicuous is seen wearing a red headband over a teased blond mullet. Scariest Moment: The killer is seen reflected in a makeup mirror while one of the characters is standing at the bathroom counter. Weirdest Moment: Jeanette and Alex share an intimate conversation while lying in front of the fireplace and start hardcore making out, after which point it is revealed that everybody else is still in the room with them, and has been the whole time. Champion Dialogue: "I didn't have any tits hardly, and I was terrified my secret would be discovered." Body Count: 7
Jeff dies in a skiing accident after falling on some rocks.
Eddie is run over with a snowplow.
John is stabbed through the back of the neck with a ski pole.
Diana is stabbed in the eye with an icicle offscreen.
Jeanette is electrocuted in a hot tub.
Carl has both feet caught in bear traps and dies somehow.
Alex is kicked out of a window and shot simultaneously.
TL;DR: Iced is bland but hardly the worst slasher out there, mostly thanks to its unique snowy setting. Rating: 4/10 Word Count: 1222
Year: 1958 Director: Bert I. Gordon Cast: June Kenney, John Agar, John Hoyt Run Time: 1 hour 19 minutes
And just like that, it's Halloween again. I'm hoping to be back into fighting shape to do a full three-part Cardboard Science/Census Bloodbath crossover with Hunter Allen of Kinemalogue next year as part of what will be our 12th annual Great Switcheroo, but traditions must be honored in whatever way we can, so for this 11th Switcheroo we're trading a single title once again. He will be covering a 1980s slasher over on his blog, so keep an eye out, while I have been assigned the 1958 sci-fi movie Attack of the Puppet People from B-movie stalwart Bert I. Gordon, who we've encountered thrice before with The Cyclops (terrible), Beginning of the End (cheesy), and The Amazing Colossal Man (solid). Midway plot spoilers will abound in this review, so if you're genuinely curious to see it before reading ahead, I highly recommend that you do so!
Spoiler #1: There are no puppet people in this movie. Spoiler #2: They don't attack anything, certainly not a dog, using a steak knife. And you thought slasher posters were big ol' liars!
So, Attack of the Puppet People, after a brief ominous prologue, picks up with Sally Reynolds (June Kenney of B.I.G.'s The Spider) answering a want ad to become the secretary of Dolls Inc. While Mr. Franz (John Hoyt of When Worlds Collide), the unusual owner and sole employee of the doll factory, makes her nervous and want to back out, he press-gangs her into starting right away. As she settles into her role, she falls for salesman Bob Westley (John Agar of Revenge of the Creature, Tarantula, The Mole People, and The Brain from Planet Arous) for reasons unknown, all while nursing a growing suspicion that the mysterious disappearances of people around the office building must somehow be related to Franz, his eerily lifelike collection of dolls that look like the missing people, and his secret locked room in the back of the factory.
When she tries to quit her job and leave town with Bob, she finds out that her suspicions were entirely correct. Franz goes haywire and shrinks her down to doll size. You see, he's been lonely since his wife left, and whenever other people threaten to leave him too, he turns them into dolls so he can love them forever. Don't worry. They go into a trance state when they're in their jars, but he takes them out and revives them whenever he can think of something fun to do with them. They soon meet other people who have been doll-ified, including Georgia Lane (Laurie Mitchell of Queen of Outer Space), who's kind of into being pampered by Mr. Franz and not having any responsibilities, and Laurie (Marlene Willis), a teenage girl who Franz keeps trying to force to sing. There's also a bland square-jawed military guy and a blond guy whose name I can't remember who does not seem to have any character traits, so we're actually fitting quite well into the slasher tradition of cardboard filler characterizations here.
Never say these crossovers aren't well-conceived. Meet the Meat, everybody!
Attack of the Puppet People is the rare 1950s sci-fi picture that works both before and after the big reveal where the special effects sequences kick in. While Sally is kind of a flat protagonist (we learn next to nothing about her desires, personality, or even where she lives), Mr. Franz more than makes up for it with an eccentric, layered performance from Hoyt that is easy to bounce off of with a wide-eye stare or two. This helps keep the tension cooking in the mystery portion, and once the doll people are unveiled, the second half of the movie is jammed to the brim with escape thriller setpieces that hum with vibrancy.
While Franz is finding it increasingly difficult to hide his involvement in the growing roster of missing persons cases and trying to juggle the intrusions of his overbearing friend Emil (Michael Mark of The Wasp Woman and Return of the Fly) and the suspicions of policeman Sgt. Paterson (Jack Kosslyn of The Amazing Colossal Man, War of the Colossal Beast, and The Spider), the doll people are trying everything in their power to escape. Well, the male ones are. This is the 1950s, after all.
As much as it makes me seem like I've hit myself in the head with a hammer before writing this review, this portion of the movie reminded me of nothing other than What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? in the way it is constantly able to string the audience along with attempts that seem like they just might work before going invariably awry. This stellar parade of thrilling moments is aided by some of the best special effects work of the notorious B.I.G.'s career.
It's pretty easy - and cheap - to make people seem small. Just make some big props and mount the camera up high. This is exactly what they do, in fact, and it works like gangbusters. But this also allows the bigger and more exciting sequences to feel convincing and dangerous in a way that the superimposed locusts of Beginning of the End simply do not. Sequences like climbing up to a giant doorknob or being forced to perform opposite a marionette (an exquisite giant puppet that is effortlessly creepy) just plain work and hold up quite well to modern scrutiny, largely because those props and setpieces were actually present on set with light hitting them and everything.
The filmmaker even has a pretty solid eye for the composite shots where Franz is interacting with the little people. The two main sets where this happens are built specifically so that walls in the back block off the doll people's environment, allowing the effects shot to have easy, square seams rather than trying to cut a silhouette around a moving figure (this trick does happen later on, with a tiny cat, and it looks as terrible as you'd expect). While the effects have their flaws, including the cat as well as the bits where the dolls are in their jars, which are clearly just 2D printed images, almost everything involving the core characters is convincing and grand, to the point that they show off a bit by having Franz set things on top of their squared-off environment and interact with them in ways that aren't just having him on the left side of the screen and them on the right.
This was probably a hell of a lot of fun to shoot.
While I'm not suggesting that Attack of the Puppet People is one of the great subtextual works of its time, these thriller moments are given added depth by Franz. He is superb both on the page and on the screen, with Hoyt and screenwriter George Worthing Yates working in tandem to deliver one of the greatest tragic antiheroes of the cinema. Franz's loneliness is intense and very real, and it drives his actions in a way that makes it almost impossible not to sympathize with him to some degree. While you're rooting for his prisoners to escape, you're also forced to contend with a deeply melancholy portrait of a broken man, whose position in the story is underscored by the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde marionette that makes an extended appearance in the third act.
It is perhaps telling that the final moment of the movie focuses on Franz, as it has spent an unusual amount of time developing him as a more layered - and significantly more devastating - version of the stock mad scientist character of '30s horror and '50s sci-fi. In fact, he's probably the second-best scientist character I've seen in one of these Cardboard Science movies, only behind Godzilla's brooding and brilliant Dr. Serizawa. Hoyt makes sure you can feel Franz's emptiness when he sees his friends running away from him, and it's a gut punch every time, even though what he's doing is categorically, well, mad.
So sure, I have some quibbles with the movie, beyond the ones I've already brought up. For instance, Agar's performance slips considerably during the scene where Bob has to panic. Maybe he's too much of an All-American Hero to feel those kinds of emotions, I don't know. Plus, the movie never actually follows up on the characters that Franz turns into dolls over the course of first act, namely his ex-secretary Janet and the mailman Ernie. The plot just forgets about them entirely and, even though we see additional dolls in his collection, focuses the entirety of the second half of the movie on Sally, Bob, and these four other characters we have no real reason to care about. It's a weird choice, definitely.
But with all that said, while Attack of the Puppet People is maybe not the best movie that Hunter has shown me over the years (we've covered Godzilla and Invasion of the Body Snatchers here, after all), it's damn close. I'm beyond delighted to have had the opportunity to give it a whirl.
That which is indistinguishable from magic:
*The explanation of the science here is deliciously wacky, comparing the resizing of humans to moving a slide projector closer to the wall. First, of course, Franz deatomizes them via a high sonic frequency. His example of this is a high note shattering a glass, which I would argue should mean that their bodies would just break into tiny fragments of bone and viscera, not atoms, but Cronenberg never remade this movie so I guess we'll never know. *Bob and Sally fret about having to run the equivalent of six miles through the city in their tiny forms, and then immediately do so in the space of a cut. Somebody sign these two up for the Olympics.
The morality of the past, in the future!:
*The want ad that Sally responds to is asking for, and I quote, a "general office girl." Mr. Franz is cancelled. *Men are constantly grabbing Sally by the shoulders within seconds of meeting her for the first time. She doesn't seem to mind, though, because she gets engaged to the first one who does it. But yikes.
Sensawunda:
*There's a long sequence where Bob and Sally watch The Amazing Colossal Man at a drive-in that was deeply unnecessary but reminded me of the joy of Switcheroos past, so I'm not mad about it. *The "does anybody know the phone number for the police?" sequence sure taught me a lot about what a scattershot mess the telecommunications system used to be. Like, I'm glad I don't ever have to know what an "exchange" is.
TL;DR: Attack of the Puppet People is a surprisingly excellent thrill ride from one of the 1950s' least consistent purveyors of B-movie schlock. Rating: 8/10 Word Count: 1811
2023 is coming to a close, so it's time for my annual roundup of the best and worst in movies, television, music, books, and everything in between! We're starting with movies, of course, because those are my bread and butter. But gee whiz, this has been a bad year for movies. Like, even 2020 was better, and movies effectively didn't exist for 75% of that year. This is certainly the worst year for movies since I started this blog in 2013, and as such I had no choice but to shrink my Top 10 list to a Top 5 and expand my Bottom 5 into a Bottom 10.
A few reminders before we start. Nobody's taste in movies/music/etc is bad or wrong. Words like "Best" and "Worst" can be strong, but that's what makes these lists fun to write. They are nevertheless just opinions and not statements of objective fact, which do not exist in criticism. If you love a movie that I hated, well that's fine! Do your thing! But I do hope you find some solid recommendations here either way. If your tastes seem to align opposite to mine, maybe use my "Worst Of" list as a guideline for what to check out next. Variety is the spice of life, and all that! Everybody poops!
Also, last year I introduced a Trans/Nonbinary acting category. This is a complicated process for any awards body, because gender is a spectrum and queerness is all about not being able to fit neatly into tight little boxes. While some contenders in this category would identify under the "Best Actor/Actress" categories, many wouldn't. While many trans people identify as nonbinary, many don't. For the time being, I'm keeping the category as it is in an effort to highlight performances from the trans and nonbinary communities. I'm also keeping the cis categories "Actor" and "Actress" separate, not because I have any faith in the binary, but because it allows me to celebrate a broader spectrum of performance. This certainly doesn't mean that women, trans people, or nonbinary folks wouldn't win if they were in other categories. Frankly, cis men would vanish from this list if I didn't have "Actor/Supporting Actor" categories. But my effort is to ensure inclusion no matter what.
MOVIES
2023 Movies I Missed That I Wish I Had Seen Before Compiling This List: Birth/Rebirth, Flora and Son, The Outwaters, Missing, Pathaan, Rye Lane, Poor Things, The Blackening
2023 Movies That I Missed, Don't Regret Missing, and Will Go Out of My Way to Continue Missing Until the End of Linear Time: Rebel Moon - Part 1: A Child of Fire, Jesus Revolution, Strays, 80 for Brady, Ghosted, Peter Pan & Wendy, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, Sound of Freedom, Heart of Stone, The Holdovers, Foe
2023 Movies I Have No Right To Speak On Because I Got Bored And Walked Out After 15 Minutes:The Super Mario Bros. Movie
The Five Best Movies of 2023
#5 Down Low
Sure, it's a collection of some of the hoariest indie movie tropes imaginable. But this tale of a repressed man's first gay encounter going horribly wrong deploys those tropes to their best advantage, dancing across a dramedy tightrope that never falls too far in either direction.
#4 Good Boy
This Norwegian thriller is about a woman who thinks she's found the perfect guy (rich, caring, ungodly handsome) until she meets his dog, Frank, a very human man dressed in a grimy dog costume. While the cat-and-mouse aspect of this movie is slightly off because the mouse has a habit of making the world's most egregious Stupid Horror Movie Character decisions, it's a taut thrill ride packed with the year's most shocking twists and turns.
#3No Hard Feelings
In a time when actual movie comedies were more prevalent, No Hard Feelings might have barely registered. But as it stands, it's a real breath of fresh air to see a raunchy R-rated comedy with good performances (Andrew Barth Feldman is a movie star in the making), a real sense of place, and several unforgettable sequences. Plus, despite its envelope-pushing storyline (Jennifer Lawrence's character is hired to date a nerdy prospective college student, and sexy antics ensue), it also has an unusual tenderness when presenting its characters, something that also came through in the director's previous better-than-it-had-to-be comedy Good Boys.
#2 Scream VI
I distinctly remember walking out of Scream VI and being really pleased with what I had just seen, but feeling like it would probably end up landing somewhere in the #5 to #7 range of my Top 10 at the end of the year. Poor naive March Brennan had no idea what a brutal year was ahead of him. But while Scream VI perhaps doesn't deserve to be considered the second-best movie in a year worth its salt, it's a delicious bit of horror franchise confection.
What it lacks in Sidney Prescott and any actually legit New York City vibes (minus the subway scene), it makes up for by being the funniest entry in the franchise since the original, peppering its scenes with actual comedy on top of all the oh-so-clever movie references. There are also some stellar sequences here, with the prologue and the Gale Weathers chase scene deserving a spot in the conversation for Top 10 moments in the entire franchise.
#1 Saltburn
It's horny and weird and hilarious and brutal, and while it perhaps fails to be all of those things at the same time, Saltburn is a perfectly engrossing roller coaster ride that I for one couldn't take my eyes off of. It's a big old mess, sure, alternating between smashing your face into its themes and stepping back to give you time to breathe and reflect on subtler moments, but it's a vainglorious mess full of some of the most invitingly lurid scenes I've seen in a theater in years, and the best clipped British comedy line readings since 2020's Emma. Rosamund Pike is fabulous, of course, but Jacob Elordi and Barry Keoghan both conquer the screen as well, dragging you in like a pair of tractor beams.
Best 2022 Movie I Missed: Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
How dare they make the sequel to a spinoff of a Shrek sequel worth my time. The Last Wish (thankfully) doesn't require knowledge of the previous Puss in Boots, in case you're scared.
In the grand new tradition of modern animated features cribbing the aesthetic of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, this movie is a gloriously textured and decadent feat of animation. On top of that, it features one of the scariest animated villains of the modern age and a storyline that, while perhaps predictable, addresses mortality in a way that is at turns harrowing, heartfelt, and profound. I mean this sincerely: Puss in Boots: The Last Wish would be a perfect double feature with Pedro Almodóvar's Pain and Glory.
Best 2021 Movie I Missed: There's Someone Inside Your House
This movie evidently has its detractors online, but I had a great time with it. It's a teen slasher that provides a great mask (the killer 3D prints the faces of each of their victims), a great organizing principle (the killer is targeting students who are hiding massive secrets), and some really gnarly stalk 'n slash sequences. What more could you want?
Honorable Mention: Godzilla Minus One
This movie certainly doesn't need more praise. It's a critical and commercial success the likes of which these shores have never seen. However, I'm not eager to heap on any excess praise considering the lead-in to the third act delivers oodles of crushingly boring, pedestrian postwar drama. Though that's not to say that the human story isn't superb. It mostly is, which does set it apart. And so is the Godzilla rampaging, which is powerful and terrifying but also a little too beholden to recreating moments from the original Godzilla. I think I'd like it more if 2016's Shin Godzilla didn't already exist, and I think it's really standing out in particular because it is thrown into sharp relief by the American Godzilla movies, which have been ranging from mediocre to dreadful lately. Anyway, I really liked this movie, but I have too many qualifications for that appreciation to want to throw my full weight behind it so soon after seeing it.
The Ten Worst Movies of 2023
#10 Five Nights at Freddy's
I have no idea how this was considered Josh Hutcherson's comeback when the one note he was given to play is "sleepy." The movie itself is just as sleepy as his character, constantly forgetting it's even trying to be scary as it unspools endless exposition for a story that you couldn't possibly understand without having played five FNAF video games before sitting down in the theater.
#9 A Strange Way of Life
Oh, Pedro Almodóvar, my love. I was so excited to see your new short film. How could I have possibly known it would be the worst thing you've ever produced? And I would know. I've seen all of it. The script is college film bullshit, the aesthetic is a blandly Western waste of the director's copious talents, and Ethan Hawke is giving one of the most bafflingly miscalibrated performances I've ever seen. What a bummer.
#8 The Exorcist: Believer
I'm no huge fan of David Gordon Green's Halloween trilogy, so I can't say I expected to like The Exorcist: Believer. But it is mind-boggling the degree to which this movie exactly misunderstands The Exorcist. I mean, it doesn't even have any idea what its own themes are, so I guess I can't entirely blame it. It features the worst deployment of legacy characters in an era full of bad legacy characters, a screenplay that always features five people talking at once without having anything to say, and a scatterbrained approach to tension-building that scuttles any chance of forward momentum.
The double possession isn't a terrible idea, but it is when they put in less than no work at establishing one of the characters experiencing it. And the exorcism itself is hopelessly bungled. With such a potent crib sheet as The Exorcist '73 in front of them, it's shocking that they thought the world would be terrified by two young girls leaning against one another and sighing for like twenty minutes while steam comes out of their mouths.
#7 Book Club: The Next Chapter
I can't say I came into this movie expecting a plot, and for the most part it was a totally charming - if pointless - romp around Italy with a group of talented actresses who aren't trying very hard. But that ending. This movie sees fit to hit you with a one-two-three-four-five punch of bloviating speeches about the nature of love that come one after another like an interminable blitzkrieg of boredom.
#6 Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
Enough pixels have been wasted on complaining about Quantumania and its oodles and oodles of crappy CGI, so I won't dwell too long here, but it really is that bad. Ant-Man's small-scale storytelling and world cannot hold up under the weight of a franchise-restarting storyline that demands grand-scale emotional stakes.
#5 My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3
Book Club: The Next Chapter was rough enough, but this was the bad vacation movie that really got under my skin. Nia Vardalos directs herself like she's on Ambien the entire time, and every single scene seems to represent human behavior as regurgitated by an alien who spent half their time on Earth asleep and the other half in a Walmart bathroom.
#4 Insidious: The Red Door
Perhaps this is the result of the "legacy sequel" of it all forcing The Red Door to hitch its wagon to the storyline of the abysmal Insidious: Chapter 2, but a horror movie has hardly been this boring and pointless in a good long while. There's a good scare gag here and there, but it's mostly just a murky slog through infrequent and rote jump scares that boasts a truly godawful script. The movie barely knows what to do with Patrick Wilson and Ty Simpkins, who are the only returning stars with roles worth thinking about, but it has less than no idea how to deliver Rose Byrne, Lin Shaye, Angus Sampson, or Leigh Whannell anything at all interesting despite taking the pain of arranging brief cameos for all of them. It's nice to see them all, but to see them in this way is just a slap in the face.
#3 "Carl's Date"
Pixar's short film department has made a lot of great ones, a few masterpieces, and at least one stinker ("Lava"). But never has a short spent so much time in the intersection between bad and pointless as this Up sequel that was originally intended to be a part of Disney+'s series of (presumably also pointless) shorts titled Dug Days. It was not given the budget or attention it needed to play in theaters, even before something as frivolous as Elemental, and it shows.
#2 Magic Mike's Last Dance
An astounding, mind-boggling misstep. Magic Mike was a pretty good movie, and while its first sequel Magic Mike XXL represented a huge leap down in quality, that was still frothy and soapy fun. This one is just pathetic, with a bad story, underwhelming acting, thin characters (the robust ensemble of the original movies is scrapped in favor of a team of cardboard cutouts with abs drawn on, about whom we know less than nothing), not-great dancing, and cinema history's most ill-judged voiceover narration.
#1 After Everything
None of the After movies have been good, but they swing wildly between bad-good mayhem and devastating tedium. This one lands in the latter camp by assuming that it might be worthwhile to spend more or less the entire runtime in the company of Hardin alone, an ocean away from Tessa. As terrible as he is with her, he is so much worse without her, and being forced to spend a feature film watching him be terrible to completely new characters in Portugal, with practically no connection to the soapy melodrama of the previous four films, is torture of the highest degree.
Best Worst Movie: Journey to Bethlehem
Just like a lot of categories that are meant to express positive sentiments this year, I'm feeling a little less emphatic about this one than I might. But I can't exactly resist a teenybopper musical that fundamentally misunderstands the Nativity story and slathers it with lazy, ill-conceived YA rom-com tropes while periodically breaking to slap you in the face with some of the most viscerally repulsive rhymes ever conceived. It combines all this with quite a few elements that are just pure cinematic confection, like the over-the-top production design of King Herod's castle that turns his throne into a lion's head with glowing red eyes.
Worst Best Movie: Skinamarink
Skinamarink is a movie that is making choices, and I respect its right to commit itself so wholly to embracing experimentalism and eschewing any semblance of narrative, character, or structure. My boyfriend Ben loved it beyond measure, and I genuinely get it. I respect Skinamarink. I honor Skinamarink. There were even one or two moments that got under my skin. But god, did I hate Skinamarink. Never have I had such a vividly painful experience in a movie theater, to the point that I couldn't help making audible groans of pain as I attempted to scrabble out from under the crushing weight of its stultifying self-assurance that spending minutes upon minutes staring at grainy public domain cartoons could be in any way worth my time and money.
Worst 2022 Movie I Missed: Avatar: The Way of Water
To be fair, most of the 2022 movies I caught up on were Oscar contenders that I didn't hate, so this is weighted heavily toward my own bias. But I'm sorry, the blue people continue to not thrill me, and it's very rude that they should contrive to attempt to do so for more than three hours.
Worst 2021 Movie I Missed: The King's Man
I truly don't know how this movie happened. I liked Matthew Vaughn's first two trips to the Kingsman well, but this prequel is a grotesque misfire on every level. It's a mystifying combination of po-faced war drama and WWI Wikipedia synopsis, delivering almost none of the saucy action mayhem the franchise is known for.
Best Dramatic Actor: Kamiki Ryūnosuke, Godzilla Minus One
I have certain qualms about the pat, pedestrian way the post-war drama plays out in Godzilla Minus One, but Kamiki is an absolute marvel, imbuing his stock character with riveting humanity. He gives the trauma and devastation of a post-war Japan a physical body, and without him, the numerous Godzilla-free sequences would be absolutely worthless.
Best Comedic Actor: Andrew Barth Feldman, No Hard Feelings
Rarely has a stage actor transitioned so smoothly to the big screen, and at such a young age! Andrew Barth Feldman shows up, takes control of this movie, and holds his own against Jennifer Lawrence something fierce.
Best Dramatic Actress: Rosamund Pike, Saltburn
It's a shame Rosamund Pike hasn't had more prominent roles in the realm of Jane Austen, because she is exquisite at delivering a caustic barb in polite, clipped British tones. In a movie that is frequently less than subtle, she is a picture of understated effectiveness, delivering oodles of information with every individual glance or inflection.
Best Comedic Actress: Megan Mullally, Dicks: The Musical
Dicks was for the most part on a comic wavelength I found mystifying, but Mullally's fearless commitment to her work found the perfect vessel in this character who seems to have been beamed in from 12 dimensions over from ours. Because of this, something like a simple scene of her asking for an object to be retrieved from a shelf can become a comedy odyssey the likes of which haven't been spotted in these parts for quite some time.
Best Dramatic Supporting Actor: Mark Patton, Swallowed
Mark Patton sets the blueprint for the modern gay villain in Swallowed. He gives us a character who is even queenier than the swishy gay-coded villains of the Hitchcock era or the Disney Renaissance. However, his performance is perfectly calibrated so that the thing you fear isn't the character's well-realized femme-ness, but the utter lack of humanity that hides behind his otherwise soft countenance. It's absolutely bone-chilling work. To watch his performance is to despair over the decades of work Hollywood robbed us of when he was practically chased out of town post-Nightmare on Elm Street 2.
Best Comedic Supporting Actor: Simon Rex, Down Low
Simon Rex gives what is basically the hetero foil to Mark Patton's performance. He revels in his commitment to his character's exuberance for his own particular peccadillos and presents us with a person who's entirely unpredictable yet clearly follows his own unknowable internal logic.
Best Dramatic Supporting Actress: Michelle Yeoh, A Haunting in Venice
Séance scenes can't help but be creepy, though they seldom rise above a sort of baseline "chills down your spine" atmosphere. Yeoh's performance as a medium in the throes of a possible possession is downright startling, however, and she deserves every ounce of kudos she could possibly get.
Best Comedic Supporting Actress: America Ferrera, Barbie
Look, you deserve all the kudos you can get if you're able to deliver that clunky monologue full of pop-feminist buzzwords and still sound like a human being while doing it, let alone doing it seven times in a row. Beyond that, Ferrera simply excels at playing a dorky suburban mom, a type of role that I for one have never seen from her before.
Best Trans/Nonbinary Actor: Morgan Davies, Evil Dead Rise
It's never explicitly stated how Davies' character Danny identifies, but Danny does exhibit a masc presentation. Danny's voice is consciously pitched lower than its natural timbre, and the exquisitely subtle thing that Davies chooses to do with that is show how the character forgets to voice modulate when experiencing bone-rattling terror. In this and many other ways, Danny is brought to life with a great deal of care and intention that is tremendously admirable.
Best Child Actor: Kate Moyer, Children of the Corn
The antagonist in Children of the Corn easily could have gone the Isaac and Malachi "religious zealot" route, but the way that Kate Moyer's performance makes her villainous cult leader character into hardly anything more than a petulant, snotty child makes her that much more terrifying. The banality of evil and all that.
Best Worst Actor: Antonio Banderas, Journey to Bethlehem
Banderas' indolent, wrathful King Herod is almost impossible to get a bead on. The character he created - I assume by taking one glance at the script and then immediately throwing it in the garbage - is delirious and compelling, but never ever explicable. Particularly watchable is the vagueness with which he approaches his line readings, like he wasn't really listening to what the other characters have said but is mad about it anyway. I think that maybe this is actually a proper "Best" performance, but the fact that nobody else in the movie is at his level makes him stand out in a way that's intensely difficult to quantify.
Best Villain: Dr. Volumnia Gaul, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
I'm convinced that Viola Davis read the name "Dr. Volumnia Gaul" and both agreed to the part and decided how to play it before she ever even cracked open the script. She is reveling in the opportunity to play a batshit mad scientist, and her evident glee makes Gaul that much more dangerous of an onscreen presence.
Worst Villain: Corn Subsidies, Children of the Corn
If you asked me beforehand how much of the plot of this movie was going to involve adults holding meetings about corn subsidies, I would have guessed none. So that's egg on my face, I guess.
Best Hero: Transubstantiation, The Nun II
Spoiler alert for The Nun II. They bless the casks at a winery to transform the libation into the blood of Christ so they can blast it at The Nun. It's gloriously ludicrous and almost makes sitting through the rest of the movie worth it.
Worst Hero: Supergirl, The Flash
If you didn't see The Flash, you may be asking, "Who the hell is this?" Well, I did see it and I have the same question. Supergirl is given absolutely no characterization, and the only moment we spend alone with her acts in direct contradiction to the scene before, so it's impossible to make heads or tails of this trumped-up cameo from a character that likely won't ever be seen again, because you can feel the DC franchise crumbling beneath the movie's feet as it races along.
Best Cameo: Carey Mulligan, Saltburn
Mulligan is basically unrecognizable as the star of Promising Young Woman here, and her brief appearance as someone caught in the web of a tragicomedy of manners is one of the most effective evocations of the movie's overall tone.
Worst Cameo: Earring Magic Ken, Barbie
Of course the notorious Ken doll that accidentally became a gay icon was going to show up in the Barbie movie. But in a project with such a stacked cast, could they not get anyone to play this character? This is nothing against Stath Lets Flats star Tom Stourton, who I'm sure is a very nice person, but he is not a huge recognizable international star, nor does he look even a little bit like the doll in question, so it's hard to imagine how this all came together. Did Brad Pitt drop out at the last minute or what?
Dead Wifiest Dead Wife: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
Is she the perfect, most loveliest angel? Naturally. Does she have a conversation with Chris Pine's character that elucidates the themes of the movie? Of course. Does she die horribly? Check. Are her flashbacks almost entirely comprised of footage of her giggling beneath a bedsheet while diffuse white light plays around her? Obvi. Does she have a name? ...Jury's still out.
Best Costume: Mask, Infinity Pool
There's a bunch of them and they're all creepy as fuck! I think they promise a movie entirely unlike the one we actually get, but you can't have everything.
Worst Costume: Wasp's Wig, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
She may have still made her Marvel paycheck, but clearly Evangeline Lilly's anti-vax ways weren't going to go unpunished on set.
Best Set: The Cafeteria, Bottoms
Bottoms is a movie I wish I liked a whole lot more than I did, but within its whirling dervish of chaos lies a beautifully grotesque exaggeration of small-town America's borderline erotic obsession with high school football, crystallized in this perfect "Creation of Adam" riff that plasters Nicholas Galitzine's Jeff on the cafeteria wall behind his table.
Worst Set: King Triton's Castle, The Little Mermaid
There's photorealism and then there's "take a look at this underlit mossy turd, idiots." Guess which style director Rob Marshall went for?
Best Cinematography: No One Will Save You
Although the "no dialogue" conceit simply doesn't work given the way the protagonist is forced into situations where either she or other people would speak, which calls out how ramshackle the whole thing is, the way it forces the story to be told visually is nevertheless superb. I would especially like to call out the well-deployed bird's-eye-view shots that give the audience a glimpse into how the alien invasion is affecting the world in ways that the main character is unaware of, and one sequence where she is running and can never quite reach the edge of the frame, putting the audience into her predicament in an immediate and compelling way.
Worst Cinematography: Five Nights at Freddy's
I think this is a still from Five Nights at Freddy's, but honestly it's so dark, who could be sure?
Best Editing: Oppenheimer
Now, it's important to note here that the editor isn't the key figure in deciding the length of a movie. That I have my quibbles with. But this is the movie of 2023 that best uses editing to its advantage to create tension in the viewer, nowhere better than in Oppie's supremely unsettling victory speech.
Worst Editing: Red, White, & Royal Blue
An absolute hash. A single montage cuts between multiple different forms of depicting texts and emails onscreen, to the point that when the lovers are actually just talking on the phone using speakerphone normally, it is impossible to tell what's happening. Also, there's one flabbergasting moment that doesn't so much cross the 180-degree line as nuke it from orbit.
Best Title Card: Evil Dead Rise
The way it "rises" from the trees might be an overly literal interpretation of the title, but it's tremendous and overpowering and comes right at the moment that its super fun prologue reaches a crescendo. Definitely a good time.
Best Score: Suzume
Oooh, that really just gets under your skin, dunnit?
Best Needle Drop: "Push" Matchbox 20, Barbie
Honestly, yes, this song is exactly the perfect totem to represent the type of music that a stereotypical "guy" would worship. They hit the nail on the head and everywhere else.
Worst Needle Drop: "Dog Days Are Over" Florence and the Machine, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
For a writer-director who has built a brand out of curating retro music for his movies and TV shows, this Florence track is both a mystifying choice for the moment it plays over and a showcase of how lazy James Gunn's approach to this entire soundtrack turned out to be.
Best Musical Sequence: "Titanium" M3GAN
The fact that M3GAN is secretly sort of a musical came out of nowhere, and it starts with this deeply uncanny and electrifying moment that I'll never forget.
Worst Musical Sequence: "Wild Uncharted Waters" The Little Mermaid
I was considering going for any of the songs from Wonka, which boast tortured rhymes paired with a frankly alarming sense of meter, but as a sequence, nothing is less compelling than this bland jaunt around some cliffs that Eric takes us on while singing his useless "I Want" song.
Best Monster: Godzilla, Godzilla Minus One
This Godzilla ain't fucking around. While his major city attack sequence is a little more beholden to recreating moments from the 1954 original than I'd like, from his ferocious and surprising island attack to the ways his spines jut from the water in Jaws-like aquatic battles, this is one of the most genuinely formidable versions of the iconic kaiju we've had in a long, long time.
Worst Monster: Sebastian the Crab, The Little Mermaid
No. Just, no. Get that thing away from me.
Biggest Laugh: Jigsaw's Notebook, Saw X
If Saw X had no other good qualities, simply including this quiet moment where John Kramer is sitting peacefully on a porch and scribbling in his notebook while the sun sets, at which point the shot reverses and you can see he's designing torture traps, would still make the entire thing worth it.
Biggest Cry: Broken Arrow, Scream VI
Including the theme from "Broken Arrow," which has been used as Dewey's theme since Scream 2, during the moment that Gale is forced to contend with his loss is just cruel.
Biggest Scream: The Memory Game, Insidious: The Red Door
I'll give it to you, director-star Patrick Wilson, you had one good scare gag in you. Kudos.
Biggest Squirm: Poor Kid, Talk to Me
The things they do to this kid in Talk to Me. I mean, come on. The fate of this young boy is twisted and trangressive and shocked me more than anything else I've seen in a theater this year.
Biggest Thirst: The Flashback, Strange Way of Life
I should probably resent it for being the one moment in the movie that feels like a proper Almodóvar scene, but the horny, heaving, decadent bacchanalia of this thirty-second flashback is almost worth sitting through the rest of it.
All these years later, and they're still coming up with compelling places to stick knives.
Biggest Scene Stealer: Baby Yoda, After Everything
This guy is supposed to be the antagonist of the movie (as much as anyone can seem evil when compared to the furiously malevolent lead character Hardin), but he's shirtless in 90% of his scenes, meaning his Baby Yoda tattoo is just chilling out there for all to see. Never has there been a more adorable distraction.
Best Title: Slotherhouse
It's not the best pun to say out loud, but it sure does the trick at selling a hell of a good horror movie premise.
Worst Title: Dicks: The Musical
It just doesn't work. It begs a lot of questions. Are the main characters dicks? Is the movie about their dicks? I'm not in junior high, so none of these questions are really interesting enough to sell the movie, which has a very specifically queer point of view that is not served by being reduced to this fratty, lazy title.
Least Title: Anyone But You
Based on the title, this movie could be about literally anything. But none of those things sound like a compelling time at the movies.
Best Line: "I had econ!" Ethan, Scream VI
Maybe the best alibi for not being a murderer ever used. The dorky desperation with which it is spoken is also exquisite.
Worst Line: "It's nice to have friends." Lylla, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
It's bad enough to force Linda Cardellini to say this insipid line once, but she's forced to repeat it over and over again. Truly embarrassing for everyone involved.
Best Poster: Scream VI
Does it write checks the deeply Torontonian movie can't quite cash? Maybe. But it's a hell of an image.
Worst Poster: Wonka
I guess Webster's dictionary called and asked the graphic design team to make an image to represent the word "busy." There is just so much shit crammed into this poster with no rhyme or reason. Its garishly ugly color scheme is enough to permanently to sear the eyes. And, like... sure, we need to see what Wonka and maybe an Oompa Loompa look like. But is it absolutely necessary to tell us that people float in the movie? It's not like those people are large enough to tell what actors are playing them!
I think the thing that angers me the most is the little girl with the lollipop, though. She's just so pointedly extraneous. Like is she meant to represent us, the audience, and what a goddamn effervescent good time we're going to have with Wonka? And what's with the curtain up in the top right corner? Look folks, you can have a stage theme, a Union Jack pinwheel, or a candy forest, but all three combined are just excruciating to navigate.
Best Poster For a Bad Movie: Strange Way of Life
Another thing that promises Almodóvar is working on all cylinders, until watching the short itself disobliges you of that notion.
Worst Poster For a Good Movie: Saltburn
It's an ugly morass of faces, yes, but it also misunderstands the movie completely. I challenge anyone who has actually seen Saltburn to describe it as "kaleidoscopic," which is literally the only concept this poster is attempting to sell.
Top Five Movie Discoveries
#5 Spree (2020)
It's not exactly subtle, but this movie starring Stranger Things' Joe Keery as a murderous rideshare driver attempting to get followers is a bloody fun romp through modern social media culture anchored by a tremendously solid performance.
#4 Z-O-M-B-I-E-S (2018)
I wouldn't have believed you if you had told me that there was a Disney Channel Original Musical about zombies that do eat flesh (but not really) that weaves an incoherent metaphor about school integration and bussing or maybe the Warsaw Ghetto and drenches the whole thing in garish pink and green. But it exists and it is a gloriously messy, delectable thing.
#3 Gambit (1966)
Honestly, this particular heist movie should have way more cultural cache than Michael Caine's other entry in the genre, The Italian Job. Oh well, its structural playfulness is a delight and delivers an indelible Shirley MacLaine performance.
#2 Calendar Girl (1993)
Now this is a qualified recommendation. It's a sex comedy from 1993 about three teenagers who want to have sex with Marilyn Monroe so bad they decide to take a road trip to her house. There are definitely jokes that wouldn't fly today. But honestly, there were way fewer than I expected, and the movie - which is led by a frequently half-dressed Jason Priestley, another recommendation - is chock full of moments that are either unexpectedly sweet or laugh-out-loud funny. It's a lightly homoerotic hangout romp, which is something I for one am very open to experiencing. I think it probably makes sense that Calendar Girl flopped super hard when it was originally released, but it was also kind of a delight?
#1 Son of Rambow (2007)
This movie about homosocial bonding via action cinema is an exquisite little gem featuring a pair of all-timer child performances from Bill Milner and Will Poulter. It's an intimate, tender movie that allows each and every one of its characters at least one opportunity to show off their humanity.
2023 Movie Crush: Serizawa, Suzume
Honestly, if the guy I had a crush on turned into a chair but then I got to go on a road trip with his hot college friend while trying to cure him... Well, let's just say you shouldn't be surprised if you happen to find a three-legged chair dumped in a roadside ditch.
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