If you're just coming here for the first time, uh... you're late. The site is no longer updated daily (see HERE for the story). But it's still kicking a few times a month, and it's better late than never! Most reviews nowadays are labeled "FTP:" and you should read THIS PRIMER to understand why. Also, while they're marked nowadays, many of the site's older reviews (i.e. 2010 or older) do contain unannounced spoilers, so tread carefully! Thanks for coming by and be sure to leave comments, play nice, and as always, watch Cathy's Curse.
PLEASE, GO ON...
Obsession (2025)
MAY 14, 2026
GENRE: THRILLER
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)
Focus paid $15m for Obsession (which only cost about a million to make), so I assume they are betting that it’ll be a decent sized hit. And if so, that means that the crowds will almost certainly include a few misguided young (and not so young) men who will see absolutely nothing wrong with what the lead character does, and probably think “Sucks that this guy had to resort to making a wish just so that ungrateful b---- would see how good he was for her.” (We call these guys incels, just to be clear.) I would love to read their reviews.
But for now you’re reading mine, and I am here to tell you that this is a solid, if imperfect genre film that once again proves (as Jordan Peele and Zach Cregger have done to even greater extent) that comedians are really, really good at coming up with outside the box horror movies, even more impressive when you consider that at its core, Obsession is merely another "Monkey’s Paw" variant. A shy, mumbly guy ironically named Bear (Michael Johnston) is hopelessly in love with Nikki (Inde Navarrette) his coworker at a music shop, and can’t gather the courage to ask her out, even when she asks him point blank if he likes her (he denies it, the coward). So he does the next best thing, making a wish on a toy shop novelty item called a One Wish Willow, only to be surprised and then increasingly horrified when the wish comes true.
His wish, specifically, is “I wish Nikki would love me more than anyone else in the world,” setting up the poor phrasing that tends to be the undoing of anyone who makes these sort of genie/wishbone/penny in a fountain kind of movie wishes. Because by loving him more than "anyone else in the world” he inadvertently (we hope?) includes herself in that mix, and quickly realizes that she is now so attached to him that she has no agency of her own. At first he's a bit freaked out at her sudden change of tune, but then she insists to come over and they kiss a little, and then via montage we see that she practically moves in right away, and they do lots of cutesy things together in what looks like the montage from any romcom. But as we quickly learn, she also can’t function without him. Even a trip to the bathroom causes her to freak out, sounding like a dying tape recorder as she scream/shouts “Why don’t you looooove meeeee” kind of desperate pleas. In one terrifying/sad moment (which Navarrette nails; she is almost supernaturally good at the sudden physical/vocal shifts her character needs to take) he goes to work on her day off and she just stands motionless, wetting herself (and worse), unable to do anything until he returns.
It covers some of the same ground as Companion, actually, but with one key difference: the entire movie unfolds through Bear’s perspective. In fact we know almost nothing about Nikki, or her friendship with Bear prior to the film’s events. Mostly through inference we can tell a few things: she’s probably aware of his feelings but does not share them (early on he offers to buy her a drink and she quickly covers it herself), and also feels stuck, wanting to quit her job so she can focus on something she feels more passionate about (only for her well meaning but clueless Romeo to make her even more stuck than she already was). And Bear doesn't fill in those blanks; when his friend Ian asks why he "loves" her so much, he says "She's beautiful..." and then trails off before he can name another trait. It's a telling aspect to the script, and something that'll probably be lost on the MRA dorks in the crowd.
It’s also clear that his feelings keeps him from having the same kind of easy rapport with her that he has with the other two people he works with, Ian and cool girl Sarah, who we learn has her own crush on Bear himself. It’s not that he’s an awkward guy *all the time*, he just gets that way around her. It’s one of the story’s great ironies that he inadvertently makes her lose herself when he makes his wish, because he essentially loses *himself* around her to begin with. In the movie’s first five minutes his cat dies, which understandably upsets him, but he is unable to even tell her as much when she calls later asking about when he’s getting to their weekly trivia game. At first he lies about why he’s not going (saying he's busy with work instead of just admitting he’s upset about his cat) and then he goes anyway, despite not wanting to.
He is able to tell Sarah easily though, so you might wonder why he doesn’t just date her, if you’re still not getting the point. You can’t control how you feel (or don’t feel) about someone any more than you can control how they feel about you in return. Take away the silly “I made a wish” premise and you’re left with the answer to “What happens when you get what you wanted from someone who didn’t actually want it back?” Again, we don’t see much of the story from Nikki’s perspective, but on occasion her actual feelings come to the surface and she understandably freaks out, only to snap back to the lovesick version he wished for. You know when you’re starting to fall asleep and you have a thought that doesn’t make any sense at all and came out of nowhere, and you then kind of wake up and go “Wait what the hell was that?” Well that’s basically what Nikki is like throughout the film, only it’s inverted; her momentary “dream brain” is actually the real her, struggling to get back out only for the one controlled by the wish stick to take over again. It’s heartbreaking and terrifying to watch, and a sex scene where she lies there motionless (and he doesn't seem to notice/care) is the moment where you should realize that, despite his nice guy, puppy dog crush on her, he ultimately doesn't really give a crap about her feelings. Hell, even the stupid willow stick was supposed to be a gift for her, only for him to use it himself, the jerk.
Ultimately, the only reason he seems to be aware he did something wrong is because she starts acting scary and upsetting him. She watches him sleep, moves in a jerky, robotic pattern when stressed, and… well, without spoiling things, the movie’s R rating is well earned with a terrifying (yes, I actually jumped) attack scene that reportedly had the MPAA in an ‘80s style “Cut this back a bit or you’re getting an NC-17” tizzy. Writer/director Curry Barker did a great job with his script, letting us uncomfortably sympathize with Bear at first and gradually turn on him as he keeps merely hoping she will settle into her new role instead of recognizing how hard she is fighting it. I’m sure everyone in the audience (myself included) has had a "I wish they liked me back" thought on a birthday candle or when the clock struck 11:11, because, well, why not? The worst that can happen is nothing changes, right? The movie isn’t demonizing people who have unrequited desires, it’s just deftly (and occasionally, violently) explaining why it’s a thoughtless thing to do. Stick to wishing to win the lottery!
Barker is less effective as an editor, however. There’s a baffling moment where Bear tries to explain to Sarah that Nikki’s change in behavior is due to her dad being sick, but Sarah already knows that the man is fine (and Bear knows she knows that, on top of it?). And at one point a character doesn’t believe that the Wish Willow is real and, in jest, wishes for a billion dollars, which promptly begin to rain down on both him and Bear. It’s a good sight gag, but later the character tells Bear “Hey it worked, I have a billion dollars!” as if Bear wasn’t there when it happened? It’s also occasionally hard to tell how much time has passed; the love montage suggests they have now been together for a while but the other characters react as if it’s only been like a day or two. Nothing deal breaking, but definitely had me scratching my head more than once.
Otherwise it’s kind of a knockout, and I’m glad I put up with seeing it with a Thursday night crowd (not sure if it’s the same everywhere, but around here they tend to be the worst) to get to it before anything got spoiled. Barker has been saying some dumb stuff about Texas Chainsaw Massacre (he has been hired to be the, what, 7th guy to “go back to the first one” with yet another reboot) but he has already shot another movie, so hopefully that one is of equal value and I can give him the benefit of the doubt for whatever he’s doing with Leatherface (not like the bar is set high for that franchise, as there hasn’t been a good one in 20 years). And I say that even though I'm still embarrassed about the little yelp I made during the aforementioned attack scene!
What say you?
PLEASE, GO ON...The Mummy (2026)
APRIL 26, 2026
GENRE: POSSESSION
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)
While a lot of folks flipped their lids for Evil Dead Rise, I found it to be disappointing. There was no real progression to the madness, the setting was wasted, and the central “woman who doesn’t want to be a mom but is forced into the role” motif has been done to death over the years. But the thing that really killed it for me was that the characters seemed incapable of reacting normally to their obviously possessed mother/sister - scene after scene had them see her do something creepy and they would react as if it was the first time she had displayed such behavior. Sadly, Lee Cronin does the same damn thing in The Mummy (full title, and stop encouraging him), albeit in a movie that runs much longer, which means it generated even MORE instances of me saying “Does this character have amnesia?”
You can tell it’s gonna be one of those movies that runs too long right from the start, as we are treated to a lengthy epilogue with characters who are not speaking English. Being that this is a major studio horror movie, we know damn well that they will not be important characters, and therefore we should not be spending more than 3-4 minutes tops with them to set up whatever they’re there to set up and be on their way. But it just keeps going and going, and yet still leaves us with questions that won’t be answered until much later. After what seems like 15 minutes we finally meet our actual main characters, and before long the plot kicks in: their daughter disappears and eight years later, as they’ve more or less finally moved on, she is found. But she’s not right…
Now, if she APPEARED to be right and gradually got all creepy and possessed, it’d be one thing. Exorcist works because Regan seems perfectly normal at first, even after displaying a few odd behaviors. Here, she is clearly, you know, the possessed little monster girl from a horror movie. She contorts in strange positions, has weird liquids oozing from around her body, makes clicking noises… it’d be like if the “Let Jesus f— you!” version of Regan was the one that Ellen Burstyn started being a little hesitant around. And yet, the parents (Jack Reynor and Laia Costa) act as if she’s merely a little quiet or something. They take her home and she starts doing horror movie things almost instantly, yet they never call a doctor or bring her to one, and even when Reynor starts to express concern that something might be wrong, it’s treated like a “You’re an uncaring dad!” kind of moment as opposed to, you know, a guy being perfectly rational.
And this sort of thing continues over and over throughout the movie! Both parents just sort of shrug off extreme behavior; even when her antics clearly cause the death of someone, they basically forget about it a scene later. Since Exorcist is just as much of an influence here as any Mummy movie I’ve ever seen (there is SOME Mummy esque stuff here, technically - though it’s basically Exorcist mixed with the same bag of tricks he used in Evil Dead), I started getting the impression that the first version of Friedkin’s masterpiece that Cronin watched was the 2000 recut/expanded one, and the stupid and pointless spider-walk scene unlocked something within him. “Yes!” a young Cronin presumably thought. “Real horror is a technically scary and creepy scene with zero followup whatsoever, never mentioned again!” Crazy things happen in this movie - many of them fun on their own! - but then there is no followup to them, making them feel weightless, not to mention continuing to increase my belief that the parents were brain damaged. Any time Cronin comes up with an idea that would force the plot to change gears, he simply cuts to black and picks up a day later, as if it never happened.
It certainly doesn’t help that the movie runs an unforgivable 135 minutes (longer than the actual Exorcist!), and not because of its complicated plot or wealth of well-developed characters. No, it’s just that every scene goes on much longer than it should, and it’s riddled with pointless subplots like Reynor visiting a professor to have some markings translated. Not only do we get a bit of the guy’s class, suggesting maybe he will be an important character (he isn’t), but there’s a whole other character (a cop who investigated the girl’s disappearance in the first place) whose point in the movie is to find answers, so this information could have been discovered by her. Instead we just have the father leaving his family behind with a clearly dangerous person to go talk to some guy he’s never met, all to get information he then does nothing with.
All of that is a shame, because at 85 minutes or so, this could have at least been a fun little Halloween time “spook a blast” type movie. Cronin uses diopters to an almost comical degree, but on the other hand he has a penchant for gnarly gore and bodily harm that serves him well here (the death via falling out a window has a very cruel/funny button to it), and the makeup for the possessed Katie is quite good. And she starts mind-controlling her siblings, resulting in some fun profanity from a little girl, always an easy way to win me over. But when the movie runs damn near an hour longer than necessary, by the halfway point it’s hard to remain engaged when the parents are so bafflingly inept. Like I understand the idea that they finally got their daughter back and don’t want to give her up again, but when she’s clearly posing a threat to their OTHER children, it just comes off as insane behavior. At least in Cathy’s Curse (a movie I would never defend for its strong character work) they establish that the mom has mental problems before she nonchalantly ignores her daughter teleporting around the house. I legit started cackling when the mom responded to the dad’s (EXTREMELY JUSTIFIABLE) concerns with the same face my own wife gives me when I tell her I don’t feel like taking our kid to his swim class or something.
Oh well. Despite the title, it’s technically an original R rated horror movie and it’s doing fairly well at the box office, so that’s always a good thing. But between this and Rise, I feel that - much like Fede Alvarez, weirdly enough since he made Evil Dead (2013) - despite their popularity with a lot of fans, I just don’t connect with this filmmaker’s particular brand of horror, so I can’t say I’ll be too excited for whatever he makes next. And that’s OK! There are probably people out there who couldn’t ever see what the big deal is with Carpenter or Romero. Just sucks when you can’t have the same fun others are having, though at least here even the people who overall liked it agree it was too long, so that’s not just me being an old grouch.
What say you?
PLEASE, GO ON...
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