Speak No Evil (2024)

Director: James Watkins

Cast: Mackenzie Davis, Scoot McNairy, James McAvoy, Aisling Franciosi

Have I Seen it Before: Never. Honestly, I would have let this one slip by if we hadn’t made a last minute change to the Beyond the Cabin in the Woods.

Did I Like It: Which would have been a shame, because I can’t readily remember the last time I was so thoroughly unnerved by a horror film. It likely helped that the film wasn’t at all on my era, as any amount of trailer probably would have given me at least some level of context going in. But really, I was probably more profoundly impacted by the fact that I was brought up by compulsive vacation befrienders, and I can easily imagine—with just a few wrong rolls of the dice—myself suffering the same fate as Ant (Dan Hough).

But the unnerving quality is there. It’s all the more impressive when one considers that the conceit of the thriller is not earth shattering in its originality (Hitchcock would have been able to make the hell out of this), and when one starts to realize that the two parents (Davis and McNairy) might be the dumbest couple in genre fiction since and Seven of Nine’s parents on Star Trek: Voyager. They keep climbing to the second floor in the third act, they really shouldn’t be surprised that the climax end up taking place mostly on the roof of Paddy’s (McAvoy, proving that he really can have some range in horror, as there is nothing of his character in Split (2016) to be found here) fact that I just happened to be in the middle of my third or fourth re-watch of Halt and Catch Fire and I had to spend more than a few minutes getting over my incredulity that Davis and McNairy are playing a—even unhappily—married couple.

Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023)

Director: André Øvredal

Cast: Corey Hawkins, Aisling Franciosi, Liam Cunningham, David Dastmalchian

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Brand new.

Did I Like It: This may in fact be the first film to feature Count Dracula, where Dracula himself (Javier Botet, who you might remember as the Hobo manifestation of It from both It - Chapter One (2017) and It - Chapter Two (2019), but I didn’t) is easily, far and away, the least interesting thing happening in the film.

Before you take that as particularly special praise for a film, let’s all calm down. Demeter is a mostly competently made thriller at sea which is destined to enjoy a long happy life of endless cable re-airings. Assuming movies are still shown on cable far enough in the future for something released in 2023 to one day enjoy that long life. The characters are stock, but sturdy in that stockiness. The performances are good, especially a moment where young Toby (Woody Norman) is overwhelmed by his fear in disappointing his uncle, the Captain (Cunningham, who I consistently get confused with Bernard Hill, and in that confusion worried the character was a bit too stock, as I kept thinking of the Captain from Titanic (1997). Any movie that manages to get a decent to good performance out of a kid is at least worth one look.

Where the film falters is in the elements which likely made it seem like good business for the studio. The movie bends over backwards to set up a sequel that might happen, but in which I’m only interested so far as I like to go to the movies. Universal, we’ve struggled with you guys trying hard to set up franchises with your stable of classic monsters. I beg you to drop it and just get weird with it. The really canonical classic Universal Monster films were the weakest—if still delightfully watchable—offerings. Don’t be DC or Marvel. Remember that it was James Whale who irretrievably planted your characters in the collective consciousness.

But that’s a disappointment in the final moments, not a fatal flaw of the preceding film. The big flaw stands in front of us on the poster as we walk into the theater. Here, Dracula is a effect, but not a special one. He hisses and jumpscares through the movie, but he has no personality. He barely has a command of any human language out of some light mimicry. The movie is pitched as Alien (1979) on a boat in the nineteenth century, but had they bothered to just pitch it as Dracula meets Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), they might have remembered the movie they were trying to make.