Category Archives: Like It

Movies I liked but likely won’t watch again. Something was off that I wish had been done differently.

All Movie Reviews, Horror, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Review: Hellcat — Fantasia Festival 2025

Hellcat had its world premiere on July 25 as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.

Brock Bodell’s Hellcat is immediately intense. A rickety mobile home tearing down the highway is our setting. Inside is Lena (Dakota Gorman), who wakes to the jolting movements of the vehicle the home is hitched to. Assessing her situation, she finds herself padlocked inside with nothing in her pockets. A voice over an intercom (Todd Terry) tells her that she is “infected” (in a nice touch, the voice comes through the mouth of a taxidermy wolf head). This driver, Clive, claims to have found her injured, and that he is driving her to a doctor. But the red flags quickly start to mount as Lena investigates the trailer.

My immediate thought on being presented the premise is that the title of the film was likely giving the twist away, or that the title was a red herring. In either case, I would have preferred the lack of clarity that the film dropped me into. There is enough ambiguity to what is going on—until Continue reading Review: Hellcat — Fantasia Festival 2025 →

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Romance

Review: I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn — Fantasia Festival 2025

I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn had its world premiere on July 23 as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.

Shina Mizuhara (Ui Mihara) is a bored actress. Promoting her new film, she lazily answers softball press questions. When she doesn’t get anything satisfying out of the interview, she turns to the camera and starts drooling. Completely unmotivated, Shina strives for a change of pace by vacationing in New York City.

Jack (Estevan Munoz) is an imaginative and passionate wannabe filmmaker. Growing up on Nirvana, George Romero, and Takashi Miike, Jack wants nothing more than to bring a punk rock ethos to film. Instead, he is a lowly intern for a New York studio, slaving away while only getting slightly closer to his dream.

When Shina and Jack get drunk at the same dive bar (and Jack finds Shina outside lying in someone else’s puke), an unlikely Continue reading Review: I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn — Fantasia Festival 2025 →

All Movie Reviews, Animation, Horror, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Review: Dog of God — Fantasia Festival 2025

Dog of God had its world premiere on July 21 as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.

Dog of God is the type of film that begins with the triumphant, heavy metal castration of a giant demon. You’re probably familiar with the type. Those Latvian rotoscope animations with heightened folkloric subject matter and a bawdy, crass sense of humor. There’s got to be hundreds of them out there.

In all sincerity, Lauris and Raitis Ābele’s Dog of God is quite unlike any other animated feature out there. It has the grimy ambitions of a Heavy Metal, a Ralph Bakshi film, or, more recently, a Mad God. But its mix of period fantasy and visual psychedelia (and its oddly high sex drive) make for Continue reading Review: Dog of God — Fantasia Festival 2025 →

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Friendship (2025) Movie Review

It has become increasingly common since the COVID-19 pandemic for stories, think pieces, podcast episodes, TikTok clips, studies, surveys, and all manner of media detritus to be made on the current state of adult friendship and an apparent “loneliness epidemic.” Why are people feeling so lonely, more so now than ever before?

Despite how it’s been characterized, this “epidemic” is not a novel phenomenon unique to one generation or isolated to a “post-pandemic” moment in time. It’s a decades old trend in declining social connection, according to former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. Still, the discourse surrounding this supposed epidemic comes with the usual nervy energy of Internet-brained discussion: if this is a crisis, then it must have a solution, and its causes must be easily condensed into digestible bullet points.

This reduction of the complexities of human relationships into basic cause-effect bullet points (we are more lonely…because technology!) is a useful entry point into Continue reading Friendship (2025) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Horror, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025) Movie Review

After spending time revisiting all of the Final Destination films, I found the long wet cement of my opinions on the franchise finally hardening. Until now, I wasn’t quite certain on the merits of the horror series in which the unseen force of Death gleefully slaughters special individuals who at first escape Death’s grasp. There is something fun about the premise, and in discrete moments this sense of fun comes to the fore. But often, these films are fairly mild in terms of horror and fail to nail the comedy tone that I think is necessary for these film to work at all.

Final Destination: Bloodlines, thankfully, fully understands the assignment. There are moments that lean towards serious drama, but in the main this film makes Continue reading Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Horror, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Final Destination 5 (2011) Movie Review

After a two-day marathon of all Final Destination films, what have I learned? That this franchise is as middling as I remembered it being. On the other hand, the downward trajectory that I remember this series having wasn’t exactly the case. I believe three is better than the first two, if only marginally. And four is one of the worst studio horror films out there. Then there’s five. I remembered Final Destination 5 being fairly bad, even as it leans more heavily into the humor (which I find a better option in the case of this series than going in the other direction). Perhaps I was a bit wrong.

The long opening sequence of Final Destination 5 does not look particularly good. Every about-to-be cadaver looks like a hunk of plastic moments before being sliced, diced, and pitched off the suspension bridge. But it is relatively exciting when compared to Continue reading Final Destination 5 (2011) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Horror, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Final Destination 3 (2006) Movie Review

James Wong and Glen Morgan returned to the Final Destination franchise with the third installment, which some consider the high mark of the series. Final Destination 3 replicated, almost to the exact number, the box office performance of the first film ($54 million domestic, $112 worldwide). Narratively speaking, though, it is the first film in the series to consciously break from the characters and events of that initial film.

The opening premonition sequence stands out as one of the best the series has to offer. I personally still prefer the highway pileup in Final Destination 2 for its visual cohesion, but for the frenetic pacing of the rollercoaster disaster, Wong does succeed in making the action mostly clear and suspenseful. The scene plays out as all the others do: One person sees a strangely detailed vision of a horrific accident that kills dozens, then comes to and causes a massive scene. A few people get pulled away from the site of the oncoming accident as a result, setting the stage for the specter of Death to come and right the cosmic scales.

Inexplicably, a character who survives the rollercoaster discovers the crashed plane and the entire plot of Final Destination, so that the characters can get an easy jumpstart on understanding what is happening to them. The attempt for these sequels to Continue reading Final Destination 3 (2006) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Horror, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Final Destination 2 (2003) Movie Review

After the financial success of Final Destination in 2000 ($53 million domestic, $112 million worldwide), New Line Cinema went ahead with a sequel. Director James Wong and writers Glen Morgan and Jeffrey Reddick did not return, leaving the sequel with a new creative team in David R. Ellis and screenwriters Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber (the latter two had no other credits at the time). Final Destination 2 would become the worst box office performing entry in the franchise (but it did provide a death so memorable and emblematic of the series that it features prominently in the TV ads for the new Final Destination: Bloodlines).

Final Destination 2 begins with the terrible decision of having a crackpot talk show guest describe the grand design of death and how the events of the first film couldn’t possibly be a coincidence. It’s a clumsy device to remind audiences of the plot of the first film, but it also creates a story world where characters are hyper-aware of the premise of the film they are a part of. Almost immediately, the protagonist, Kimberly (A.J. Cook), connects the freak accident she just experienced on the highway with the plane crash from the first film. This is efficient storytelling, I suppose, but it also lazily yadda-yadda-yaddas the finer points of the series’ premise.

The premonition sequence of the second film is fairly well-done. Some of the visual effects don’t look the absolute cleanest, but it is fun to watch the geography of the highway unfold, introducing our cast of characters and delivering a few gnarly gags. And the end of it is a genuinely surprising turnabout.

David R. Ellis, the director, spent much of his career in the stunt world. It is fitting, then, that the staging and execution of this opening sequence is exciting. Some of the other set pieces are exciting, too, albeit more mildly so. Whether intentional or not, the death scenes are also Continue reading Final Destination 2 (2003) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Horror, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Final Destination (2000) Movie Review

With Final Destination: Bloodlines coming out this summer, I have decided to take a trip down memory lane and re-watch the entire franchise of you-can’t-cheat-Death-because-he-will-come-for-you-but-also-play-with-his-food-by-making-your-death-an-elaborate-Rube-Goldberg-device-of-death horror flicks. It is an odd franchise. The films were always mildly profitable and regularly found airplay on cable. But they also consistently got middling reviews, and the franchise holds something of a lesser status in the horror genre pantheon.

Final Destination and Final Destination 3 were directed by James Wong, and they were written and produced by Wong and his creative partner Glen Morgan. Wong and Morgan were regular writers on The X-Files and wrote some memorable episodes (“Squeeze,” “E.B.E.,” “Home”). Wong directed a good episode of the show titled “Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man.” He also directed the heinous Dragonball: Evolution, but for the purposes of this review we won’t hold it against him.

The opening portion of Final Destination feels reminiscent of an episode of The X-Files (it was originally written as one by Jeffrey Reddick), and it has a sense of irony that looks like The Twilight Zone if you squint a little. A high school kid named Alex (Devon Sawa) has an irrational and superstitious fear of flying. He wants to keep the tag on his bag from the last flight he was on, because he knows that that plane landed safely. When he gets to the airport, he can’t help but notice Continue reading Final Destination (2000) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Drama, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words), musical

A Complete Unknown (2024) Movie Review

No matter how you want to trace the lineage of the music biopic, we don’t arrive at a formula-to-an-absolute-fault film like Bohemian Rhapsody without first traveling through James Mangold’s Walk the Line. To see Johnny Cash resurface in Mangold’s return to the genre (now played by a perpetually suave Boyd Holbrook) is like witnessing a poltergeist haunting another film. Or a demon that somehow escaped total exorcism from Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, a superior take down of the music biopic and a film that remains culturally relevant so long as Hollywood continues churning out mediocre celebrations of celebrity.

Walk the Line was a crossover success, breaking $100 million at the box office, garnering generally positive reviews, and earning a number of accolades including an Oscar for Reese Witherspoon. A Complete Unknown is angling to do the same. The problem (perhaps) is that Continue reading A Complete Unknown (2024) Movie Review →