Heart Eyes (2025)

Director: Josh Ruben

Cast: Olivia Holt, Mason Gooding, Gigi Zumbado, Michaela Watkins

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. I’ll admit that it somehow missed my radar altogether, but a last-minute re-working of the Beyond the Cabin in the Woods schedule brought me here.

Did I Like It: I can’t readily recall the last time I’ve been on such a roller coaster with a movie. For the first stretch it feels like it is going to be a fun gore-fest, somewhere in the vein of the Evil Dead series (and likely competing with The Monkey (2025) for screens and audiences). It also wants to weave romantic comedy tropes into the trappings of a horror movie. It worked for Shaun of the Dead (2004), why can’t it work here*?

Then it settles into the comfortable slasher rhythm that has become ubiquitous in the wave of Scream (1996) and its more recent sequels. I’m sitting there not being terribly frightened (I might be past the time where a slasher elicits any kind of real fear) and I’m more concerned with trying to figure out who did it.

I’m kind of tired watching a horror movie and slowly realizing I’m watching less of a horror movie and actually watching what amounts to a cozy mystery**.

But then something happens in the third act that gave me a strange sense of hope. The mystery suddenly becomes incidental to the murder and mayhem. For a moment, I almost dared hope that the pure simplicity of John Carpenter might be heading for its renaissance.

Then the film goes on for another twenty minutes and veers right into being just another Scream clone. Disappointment abounds.

*Spoiler alert for the end of the review: The reason it won’t work is because few people are Edgar Wright. Shaun works because the horror works, and the romantic comedy works. This movie ends up being a mashup of the later Scream-quels and something like Crazy Stupid Love (2011), when I’d really love to see a mashup of You’ve Got Mail (1998) and Halloween (1978). But I get why film studios hesitate to make films they can only market to me.

**There are few terms in the world that set my teeth on edge more than “cozy mystery.” I have my reasons.

Totally Killer (2023)

Director: Nahnatchka Khan

Cast: Kiernan Shipka, Olivia Holt, Charlie Gillespie, Lochlyn Munro

Have I Seen it Before: Never. Feels like I’ve been spending most of the last year having everyone I know recommend the film, but never quite making the time to get it done, outside of the tail end of our Beyond the Cabin in the Woods season.

Did I Like It: I’m going to start the review by saying I liked the film very much, but I recommend you stop reading this review and take that recommendation before I let loose with any of the film’s surprises.

Now I know why everyone has been recommending the film. I’ll admit that somewhere along the way I got this film conflated with Mandy (2018) or more likely Freaky (2020) and had no idea what I was going to be in for as things unfolded. That all being said, being surprised that a film is actually about time travel is one of my personal favorite experience to have a with a movie. To construct a movie whose pitch almost had to be Back to the Future (1985) meets Halloween (1978) not only feels like a winner, but would have guaranteed I would have forked over whatever resources I had to get the thing made, were I in that position, or I’d be secretly mad that I hadn’t come up with the idea first. I can only hope that I didn’t spoil the surprise for you.

That begin said, I think it wouldn’t be terribly controversial to say that the film succeeds more as a teen time travel fantasy-comedy, and less as a slasher. While the Sweet 16 Killer* has a better mask than Michael Myers does in most of the Halloween series, the killings often feel perfunctory. I never once feel the dread that Carpenter and company wield with such deceptive ease. This would doom the whole affair to be just another bland entry in the slasher genre, classier than anything spawned from Friday the 13th (1980), but less enjoyable than Scream (1996) or its sequels. Thankfully, it does wind up being one of the more satisfying time travel comedies in recent memory, more than living up to its obligations to be a riff on Back to the Future.

*Form dictates I identify the actor in the role here, but that would constitute at least something of a spoiler, to say nothing of the fact that I’m not sure I can succinctly answer that question at any given moment in the film.