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Predator: Badlands (Theatrical) 2025

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PREDATOR BADLANDS is just what the hunter ordered to breathe new life into a franchise whose movies had, frankly, gotten stale. There is only so many times you can rehash the same formula of badass modern warriors being hunted by a superior alien enemy, the titular Predator, and one of said warriors has to reconnect with unorthodox traditional methods to fight back.  This movie flips the perspective and places a Predator as our protagonist. It opens on the homeworld of the Yautja, the species name of the Predators, as we bear witness to the events that land our protagonist Dek (played by Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) on the planet Genna. Genna is a death world. Its plants and animals all highly dangerous and regard Dek as prey. Fighting for survival against the savage flora and fauna, Dek crosses path with a damaged female synthetic human named Thia (played by Elle Fanning). Or at least her upper half.  Dek intends to kill a monster known as the Kalisk in order to restore h...
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Until Dawn (Netflix) 2025

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Full admission: I have never played the game so I cannot comment on how true it is to the source material. What I can comment on was how much I enjoyed this movie despite hearing only negative things about it. Until Dawn tries to straddle that genre line between horror and comedy that was so masterfully done by Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness.  We follow a group of friends, Clover, her ex-boyfriend Max, her pals Nina and Megan, and Nina's boyfriend, Abe. They are retracing the footsteps of Clover’s sister Melanie who had gone missing. They take shelter from a freak storm at a visitor centre in Glore Valley, an old mining town that fell victim to an earthquake in the past and is now a nature reserve.  While waiting out the storm, they find a notice board with the faces of various missing people and a guest book with their names, including Melanie. And that’s when strange things start to happen. The storm takes on a life of its own to prevent them from leaving, a giant beast ...
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The Last Voyage of The Demeter (Netflix) 2023

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The tale of Dracula has captivated horror fans for decades and 2023 gave us not one but two new spins of that tale: the drama comedy Renfield, and the suspense horror movie Last Voyage of the Demeter. This review is for the latter which takes a single chapter from the original Dracula novel, originally told as a series of Captain’s log entries, and develops it into a fearsome survival story against a powerful demonic foe.  Our story begins with a doctor, Clemens, joining the crew of the ship Demeter, heading from Bulgaria to England. The Captain, Eliot, has been contracted to transport multiple crates to London. With him are his young grandson Toby, quartermaster Wojchek, and a crew picked out from the port.  Their uneventful journey takes a turn for the worse when a mysterious stowaway, Anna, is discovered in one of the crates. She has strange bite marks on her and the crew sees her as a bad omen. Unrest turns to trouble when it becomes clear something else had emerged from a...
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Fantastic Four: First Steps (Theatrical) 2025

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Set in an alternate reality, steeped in 1960s retro futuristic aesthetic, FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS was easily the best on-screen interpretation of the titular quartet, not just among movies but I would be so bold as to say among cartoons as well.   It was a briskly paced plot but its focus on the Four never wavered, giving us some surprising depth as we accompany our main characters through life changing events.   A quick in-universe montage got us up to speed on the world of the Fantastic Four: Scientists Reed Richards and Susan Storm, her brother Johnny Storm and Reed’s ace pilot pal Ben Grimm are caught in cosmic rays during a space expedition and granted super powers. They quickly become the heroes of earth protecting the world from super criminals, sometimes with force as a last resort, but often times through diplomacy.  Fast forward 4 years later, the world is at peace, former villains are reformed (somewhat), and now Reed and Sue are expecting their first ...
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