APARTMENT 7A (2024) ***

Apartment 7A is a prequel to Rosemary’s Baby.  I like that when Paramount decides to fiddle with a classic of that stature, they confine it to television (which is more than I can say for Warner Bros. and their uneven string of theatrically released Exorcist sequels).  First, there was the dreadful Made for TV sequel, Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby (starring Patty Duke!) and then the miniseries remake (which I still haven’t seen).  Now comes this, which went straight to Paramount+. 

Julia (The Wolf Man) Garner stars as Terry, a dancer who breaks her ankle and struggles to find work on Broadway. The Castevets (Dianne Wiest and Kevin McNally) are a kindly old couple who help her get back on her feet by letting her stay in their spare apartment.  One night, Terry has drinks with the producer of the show (Jim Sturgess) and wakes up pregnant.  Pretty soon, she begins getting everything she wants, including the lead in a Broadway show.  She eventually realizes the devilish plans the seemingly benign couple has in store for her. 

The dancer Garner portrays is a minor character from Rosemary’s Baby.  If you’re familiar with that film, you probably already know she comes to a gruesome end.  Garner is fine in the lead, but it’s Dianne Wiest who steals the show.  She is a hoot in the role originated by Ruth Gordon, who won an Oscar for her work in the original.  She sinks her teeth into the scenery like a pit bull and devours everything in sight. 

Director Natalie Erika James is smart enough not to try to ape Roman Polanski’s style.  She does a good job at playing within the beats of Rosemary's Baby and letting the movie do its own thing within the confines of that film’s structure, without exactly replicating it.  I’m thinking specifically of the scene where Rosemary is drugged and impregnated.  Since Garner is a dancer in this one, the dream morphs into a Satanic Busby Berkeley dance sequence, and I must say, it is one of the best Satanic Busby Berkeley dance sequences on record. 

As far as 2024 prequels to horror classics go, it’s not a patch on The First Omen, but it works surprisingly well.  As with that film, the director is using the bones of a durable horror franchise to make statements about women’s rights, and the mix of social commentary and chills works more often than not.  While the pace threatens to peter out in the third act, the finale is decent enough to make up for the wait.  Thanks to James’ efforts, Apartment 7A feels like a genuine continuation of the original, and not just a typical made-for-streaming cash grab. 

ICED (1989) **

A mentally unbalanced skier flips out when his girlfriend makes time with a hot shot competitor.  He gets so mad that he commits suicide by skiing off a mountain.  Four years later, the now married couple go on vacation to a ski lodge where they rent a time share with a group of friends.  They get worried when someone doesn’t show up, and as the group splits up, a killer wearing snow goggles picks them off one by one. 

Iced is a lukewarm skiing themed slasher that has found something of a cult following over the last couple of years.  That’s probably due to people being nostalgic about it from renting it back in the ‘80s.  If you’re like me and missed out on it back then, there’s honestly not a whole lot here to recommend.  It’s mostly dull for the first hour or so as the killer waits an exorbitant amount of time before he starts racking up bodies.  The murder sequences include death by snowplow, ski pole, icicle, hot tub electrocution, bear traps, and good old-fashioned stabbing.  Too bad just see the aftermath most of the time. The POV shots from inside the killer’s cracked snow goggles are pretty cool though. 

Debra (Dr. Caligari) De Liso makes for a solid Final Girl, all things considered.  You’ve got to respect any actress who spends much of the third act running around in the snow in her underwear.  I do have to take points off for the laughable scene where she discovers the bodies of her friends and calls not the police, but her time share representative!  What?  Did she think because her friends were slaughtered, he was going to give her a discounted rate?

The completely random and fairly graphic sex scenes help somewhat.  It’s also fun seeing little Wednesday Addams, Lisa Loring all grown up and playing the sexpot of the group.  She has a couple of nude scenes that are altogether ooky.  

Even with a handful of highlights, Iced is still bound to leave you cold. 

Director Jeff Kwitny made Beyond the Door 3 next. 

AKA:  Blizzard of Blood.

IN THE LOST LANDS (2025) **

Well, they tried to slip a post-apocalyptic witchy werewolf western movie starring my girl Milla Jovovich under my radar.  As with anything tangibly Milla related, I try to stay on top of these things the best I can.  They almost snuck it by me.  Almost.  This one was (surprise) directed by her hubby Paul W.S. Anderson and is based on a story by none other than Game of Thrones’ George R.R. Martin.  (What’s with all the double middle initials?)

Milla is a witch with a tattooed face named Gray Alys (What’s with Anderson having Milla play characters named Alice?) who ventures into the “Lost Lands” at the behest of a Queen (Amara Okereke) who wants her to steal a shapeshifting spell from a werewolf.  She gets a burly cowboy (Dave Bautista) to act as her guide and together, they try to stay one step ahead of “The Church”, who want to execute Alys for her witchy ways. 

This is one of those hodgepodge movies that borrow liberal doses from other movies without finding a unique voice of its own.  It has cowboys and witches and werewolves and knights from the Crusades, and yet it just feels like it’s making shit up as it goes along.  Milla’s witch powers are often inconsistent and sometimes downright lame.  The human villains are paper thin and forgettable too. 

The effects are lackluster as well.  Often times, it just feels like the actors are standing around on a greenscreen soundstage while 95% of everything around them is CGI.  (And not particularly good CGI either.)  It’s like watching a demo for After Effects or something.

The action is a mixed bag.  Anderson’s most successful action sequence is when Milla and Dave fight off mutants in a burned-out nuclear power plant.  That’s mostly because it feels like leftovers from one of their Resident Evil sequels. 

Milla looks good though in a black cloak and wielding two little scythes.  Bautista has a look that says, “Gee, I thought my career was in a better place than this”.  Neither performer phones it in, but it’s not exactly their best work either. 

As far as Jovovich and Anderson collaborations go, this is on the lower end of the spectrum.  That said, you’re either the kind of person who will watch a movie where Milla Jovovich sports silver Wolverine-style claws and fights hand to hand with a werewolf or you aren’t.  Despite flashes of this kind of enjoyable nuttiness, In the Lost Lands ultimately feels like a lost cause. 

SLAYERS (2022) ½ *

Slayers is a vampire movie.  It wants to be a horror comedy, but it fails miserably on both counts.  I will give it this:  It is (technically) a movie, and it does have vampires.  That’s about all I can say for it though. 

Thomas Jane stars as a grizzled vampire hunter with a Santa Claus beard.   When a group of social media putzes (I refuse to call anyone with a video blog an “influencer” because most of the time the only two things they influence are Jack and shit and Jack left town) get lured by a vampire to his mansion under the guise of using their social media platforms to roll out a new “vaccine”.  Naturally, the serum turns humans into vampires and it’s up to Jane to stake them before everyone likes and subscribes. 

Slayers goes so wrong so fast in so many ways it will make your head spin.  From the cringe worthy narration to the annoying YouTube and Tik Tok style videos to the video game graphics title cards, it is a fucking mess from top to bottom.  All this plays out like one long ADHD fever dream by a Mountain Dew-addled iPad kid who lost his last brain cell watching Skibidi Toilet. 

I guess the whole Tik Toker thing may have been borderline tolerable if the film was actually satirizing these sorts of individuals.  Instead, they’re thrown in there almost as a selling point.  Some fun may have been had watching these nimrods get slaughtered wholesale.  Heck, it might’ve even been watchable had the editor not chopped everything to bits and the graphics guy didn’t throw every chintzy title trick in the book onto the screen.  Not to mention all the stupid asides that would only make the most inebriated of souls chuckle.  (Example:  There’s a shot of some owls and their hooting is translated into English via subtitles.)

Near the end, the film uses clips from public domain movies like Nosferatu, Horror Express, and Silent Night, Bloody Night as flashbacks.  Seriously, don’t put clips of better movies into your shitty movie.  It will only make the audience want to watch those films instead. 

The sad thing is that Slayers manages to waste a solid cast.  Jane, Abigail Breslin, and Malin Ackerman are lost at sea with the limp material.  In fact, being a fan of the cast kind of makes it worse because you know they all deserve so much better (especially Ackerman). 

Considering Slayers is basically one long anti-vaxxer statement makes it especially hard to take.  Couple that with the fact it was filmed during the pandemic, which makes you think it honestly believes its convictions.  That sentiment right there is the final nail in the film’s… ahem… coffin. 

PLANET DUNE (2021) * ½

It’s been a while since I watched a “Mockbuster” from The Asylum.  Naturally, Planet Dune is The Asylum’s version of Dune, but done on a budget that wouldn’t even cover the catering cost for that movie.  It’s rare when they can get an actor to star in one of these things that’s tangibly related to the blockbuster they are mocking.  It’s kind of funny/sad that Sean Young, who starred in the 1984 original, agreed to appear in this.  In every scene, she has a look about her that says, “So… it’s come to this, huh?”  She gets through her dialogue scenes with all the energy of an actor who is getting paid just enough to leave their trailer.  You almost get the sense she gave the directors one take and one take only.  It’s enough to make her performance in Ace Ventura:  Pet Detective look dignified and thoughtful by comparison. 

A hot shot space pilot (Emily Killian) disobeys orders and is sent to prison.  There, she must fly freighters at the ass end of the galaxy on a desert planet.  When her mission goes sour, she and her crew are left stranded on the planet where they must contend with giant sandworms.  With no hope for a rescue, the crew tries to work together to survive.  

This is less a riff on Dune and more like a space version of Tremors.  That said, there is a scene where some characters ride on the back of a worm, so maybe this was one of those cases where The Asylum tried to get as close as they could to their inspiration without being sued.  The CGI sandworms themselves are pretty shoddy.  They look like The Langoliers with giant tails.  The spaceship effects are much better though, and while they aren’t exactly Industrial Light and Magic, they look more sophisticated than your typical Asylum joint. 

Too bad the movie itself just kind of sits there.  It would be one thing if it moved at a decent pace or had a sense of humor, but unfortunately that’s not the case.  Overall, it’s mostly forgettable and lame. 

Co-director Glenn Campbell also helmed the amusing Shark Side of the Moon. 

HOUSE OF DARKNESS (2022) ** ½

For a while there, Neil LaBute was the hottest name in the independent film world.  His first three movies, In the Company of Men, Your Friends and Neighbors, and Nurse Betty really announced him as a unique voice in cinema.  After his much maligned (but I liked it a lot) Wicker Man remake, his output became a bit spotty as he began mixing Hollywood fare like Lakeview Terrace with lots of television work.  House of Darkness finds him veering back into the horror territory of The Wicker Man.  While it’s not nearly as much fun as that flick, it certainly has its moments. 

Justin Long picks up Kate Bosworth at a bar and takes her back to her place for a night of fun.  The first sign that something is up is she lives in a castle that would look right at home in a Hammer movie.  Just when they are about to get down to business, they are interrupted by her spooky sister (Gia Crovatin) who wants to hear a ghost story. 

What’s unique about House of Darkness is that it finds LaBute exploring a lot of the same themes he dealt with in his early films (namely the power dynamic between women and men) but firmly set in the horror milieu.  Since the bulk of the movie is just Bosworth and Long (who were both in Barbarian the same year) talking, it often feels like a play.  Fortunately, both performers are quite good, and they hold your attention as they have genuine chemistry together.  Long (who has slowly become a horror mainstay in the last decade or so) is especially good as the womanizing philanderer who slowly begins to realize he’s in over his head with the sinister sisters. 

All of this is successful for a while.  It’s just that the deliberate pacing doesn’t do the movie any favors.  LaBute also waits far too long to play all his cards.  The twist ending is predictable and slight, which makes the film feel more like a shaggy dog story than a gothic horror campfire tale.  This kind of twist may have worked as a short story in an anthology horror flick.  As far as a full-length feature goes, it’s ultimately too little too late. 

HAVOC (2025) ***

Gareth Evans hasn’t made a movie in a while.  That’s mostly because this flick has been in limbo more or less since the pandemic.  Now that it’s finally arrived on Netflix, I can honestly say that while it is far from his best work, there are enough glimmers of gruesome action carnage here to make it worthwhile. 

Tom Hardy stars as a dirty cop in a dirty city run by a dirty mayor (Forest Whitaker).  When the mayor’s son (Justin Cornwell) winds up in the middle of a triad gang war, Hardy makes a deal with Whitaker to bring his son home.  In return, his debt to Whitaker will be erased.  That doesn’t sit well with Hardy’s even dirtier cop buddies, led by Timothy Olyphant, who want the kid dead for putting one of their own in the hospital.  Things get complicated when the triad shows up looking for retribution. 

Well, they all can’t be The Raid.  Hell, they all can’t even be The Raid 2.  While it takes a long time for Havoc to muster up some momentum, things perk up nicely during an epic nightclub brawl that features flashes of Edwards’ patented brand of cinematic violence.  Hardy takes on a bunch of meat cleaver and machete-toting gang members, and the ensuing gory geysers of gurgling blood would make your typical horror flick blush.  The finale, set at a snowy cabin in the woods, isn’t quite as frantically choreographed, but it does have a showstopping moment involving a speargun. 

Hardy brings the same kind of twitchy intensity he brought to the Venom movies.  Sometimes he slides into Nicolas Cage-style theatrics and over the top line readings (“I’M A FUCKING COP!”), which add to the fun.  Olyphant is quite good too as the slick, steely-eyed villain. 

Evans is one of the best action directors working today.  The one-two-three punch of Merantau, The Raid, and The Raid 2 was about as close as anyone’s come to replicating John Woo’s trifecta of A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, and Hard Boiled.  That said, Havoc is a good-not-great action flick that lacks the sustained intensity of Evans’ previous work.  Then again, it’s a bit unfair to compare it to those action classics, even if it is a bit uneven.  At any rate, it’s definitely well-worth checking out, especially for fans of bloody action brutality.