Kraven the Hunter (2024)

Director: J.C. Chandor

Cast: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ariana DeBose, Fred Hechinger, Russell Crowe

Have I Seen It Before: Nope. Barely have an awareness that the character exists in Spider-Man’s world. As this clearly didn’t strain my patience with attempts to tie its main character to the wall-crawler, I’m still not all that aware of it.

Did I Like It: I’m like most Americans. I eat beef. I’m angry about anywhere between a half dozen to two dozen things in life in the 2020s. I also had no interest in any Spider-Man film that doesn’t actually feature Spider-Man.

But then I started a podcast about bad movies, and that Sony’s flailing attempts to double down on the strategy that was brought out into open by North Korea* and bring the Sinister Six to the screen were coming for me. Both the character and series surrounding Venom (2018) have their fans, and golly, do I wish them well. Morbius (2022) might have been on the level of Citizen Kane (1941), but Jared Leto is so annoying, I wasn’t going to see it. No one who made Madame Web (2024) seemed like they wanted to be there, and in the great empathy machine that is the moving picture, I was right there with them.

And then there’s Kraven. There are only a few line readings that are worthy of derision, and only a few puts it in the lead for this series that never really was. The plot is kind bland, but it doesn’t ring as a traffic jam of things no one could possibly care about, so again, point to Kraven. Taylor-Johnson is occasionally a very charming screen presence, almost to the point where I suspect the rationale for participating in this film that was never, ever going to become a franchise was that Taylor-Johnson wanted to be on screen exuding a James Bond-like mystique to him, so that he could document such a quality before the EON people ever asked him to screen test.

*Kids, ask your parents.

28 Years Later (2025)

Director: Danny Boyle

Cast: Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Alfie Williams, Ralph Fiennes

Have I Seen it Before: Never. Hell, I just recently got on board with 28 Days Later (2002).

Did I Like It: The movie being sold in this film’s trailers seemed like a fine one. Years after the initial onset of the Rage Virus, there’s a little island village in the United Kingdom that got spared the worst of it.

But for how long?

That’s a perfectly fine log line for a movie, and with Danny Boyle back in the mix* it feels like whatever was going to be on tap, it would be both elevated and do its level headed best to transcend the trappings of the genre.

But that’s not what the movie is about. At all. The island of Lindisfarme is just as secure from the Rage Virus as it has been since the beginning of both this movie and the early aughts. What the movie is really about is so much more poignant, genuine, relevant, and—I really can’t believe I’m going to say this about a zombie film—life-affirming.

I really don’t want to tell you what it really is about. If you want to hear my thoughts on the particulars, there’s an episode of Beyond the Cabin in the Woods that is either already available, or will be soon.

Let me leave this then with the thought the film leaves us—when it isn’t setting up a sequel approaching faster than one of the film’s non-obese zombies—and I never thought would come from a Zombie film:

Memento Amori.

As I type this, the film’s opening weekend is still in full swing. It hasn’t nearly reached its full audience yet. I google “memento amori” now, and I get back a bunch of catamaran charters in the Caribbean.

I have a real feeling that the phrase will take on a new meaning very, very soon.

*Did anyone else think the movie would also have a return from a post-Oppenheimer (2023) Cillian Murphy? Did anyone else that one zombie in the trailer was Murphy? Just me? Okie doke!

Nosferatu (2024)

Director: Robert Eggers

Cast: Bill Skarsgård, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Brand new movie. First episode of a new season of Beyond the Cabin in the Woods. Interesting enough, a day before actually sitting down to watch the movie, I was volunteering at the theater and had to help somebody kick out some pathologically disruptive kids from a screening. So, I can cross that one off my bucket list?

Did I Like It: There’s probably not a whole lot new one can do with an adaptation of Dracula. The tentacles of that story seep into so much that if you’re alive in any way, you could probably guess where the story is going. There’s not even that much new anyone can do as a riff to Nosferatu (1922). Nothing will ever be quite as unnerving as the sight of Max Shreck as Count Orlock, especially when it was abundantly clear that there was no special effects as we understand them to convert a man into some kind of unspeakable creature of the night.

That all being said, Eggers immediately makes the case for his version of the story to need to exist. It is filled with atmosphere and the kind of concerted visual filmmaking that made up the best of the silent films, and is almost uniformly not on the menu for newly made movies.

Much has been made of the film’s disinterest in offering a riff on the original Orlock. Some say that the character as he appears in this film has little to do with what we have traditionally come to imagine when presented with vampires, but honest to God those people aren’t thinking things through very much. This Orlock is the first—with the possible exception of some early scenes with Gary Oldman in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)—that looks like he might have once lived as Vlad the Impaler. That would be enough to consider the film something of a fascinating experience, but I also can’t get over Skarsgård’s performance in this film. There is no trace of Pennywise or any of his other performances here, so much so that I honestly didn’t realize it was Skarsgård until the end credits. Even Karloff and Lugosi ended up playing mild variations of a static screen persona in their varied careers. We may have found a new master of horror, who can disappear so completely into a role. What can’t he play?