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.

Terminator Dark Fate (2019)

Director: Tim Miller

Cast: Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mackenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes

Have I Seen it Before: Oddly enough, no. For the most part. Who would have thought that any Terminator movie could reach for anything fresh? 

Did I Like It: Yes… But a qualified yes.

It’s probably unreasonable to ever thing that we’re going to get a Terminator film that is somehow better that the first two films directed by James Cameron. Several have now tried, and they’ve had varying degrees of ultimately disappointing success. Cameron is one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. Even his arguable failures like The Abyss (1988) never fall short of ambitious.

He’s now back in the business—if even in an ancillary fashion—and the results are remarkable. The film has a lively energy that none of the non-Cameron films could even hope for, and this is coming from someone who actually kind of sort of liked Terminator Genysis (2015), despite it being a huge convoluted mess of time travel with a crappy title. The clutter of previous entries has been swept away, and the action re-focused on the central element of the first and greatest movies, Sarah Conner as played by Linda Hamilton.

Now that doesn’t make it entirely fresh, as a rash of legacy sequels—most notably last year’s Halloween—have trucked in similar territory. This film isn’t quite as crowd pleasing as that other film, but one has to admire this for indulging only in the bare minimum of fan service (especially for the sixth film in a series). The only time nostalgia takes over is in the films opening minutes for a scene that takes place shortly after Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). The technology on display to make Hamilton, Schwarzenegger and even Edward Furlong appear as if no time has passed since that peak of the series is staggering. Thirteen years ago we were subjected to the twitchy CGI horrors that were Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan in the opening scenes of X-Men: The Last Stand, and four years since Schwarzenegger himself awkwardly appeared as his younger self in the aforementioned Genysis, but it truly seems like the technology has reached its maturity here. How long before we are treated to entire films using the same tools?

How long before this series clears the decks again and just gives us a an entire movie with those stars as they appeared in the 90s.

I suppose Dark Fate’s box office will dictate what that strange techno future will look like. 

Come to think of it, Dark Fate is kind of a dumb title that doesn’t really have much to do with the film that surrounds it. At least Genysis was the name of something in that movie…

Oh, well, start the clocks for the next entry Terminator: Woo-hoo b-words coming sometime in the next few years.