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F This Movie! — TV & Film
F This Movie!

Movie love for movie lovers.

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Director Essentials: Clint Eastwood Nov 03, 2025
by Patrick BromleyA filmmaker who almost always Makes My Day.
Clint Eastwood is an icon and a legend, one of those movie stars who's recognized solely on a First Name Basis. While he originally made his mark in front of the camera in spaghetti westerns and thrillers like the Dirty Harry franchise, I would argue Clint did his best work as a director rather than as an actor. In fact, I'd argue that of all the actors to make the transition into filmmaking in the last 50 years, Eastwood might claim the top spot considering his range, his longevity, and his ability to tell lasting stories in a spare, clean style. Here are some of his essential movies.
1. Play Misty for Me (1971)Clint's first film as director is a solid little thriller about a California disc jockey who gets Fatal Attraction'd (long before Fatal Attraction was a thing) by a fan played by Jessica Walter, 30 years away from her defining role as matriarch of the Bluth family. Like so many of the movies that followed, his first film is deeply personal and can be interpreted as either a misogynist text in which women be crazy or as a self-reflective study of a toxic man who treats women like shit and must reap what he sows. Either way, it's incredibly revealing about Clint as a person, his complicated relationship to women in his personal life, and his onscreen legacy as the pinnacle of alpha machismo. He's impossible to truly pin down throughout his seven-decade filmography. Play Misty needs to be on the list because it's the one that started it all: his career behind the camera, his thorny personal and gender politics being laid bare in his work, and even his incredibly quick and efficient shooting style -- the movie was brought in days under schedule and $50,000 under budget. This technical expertise learned from greats like Sergio Leone and Don Siegel, plus his total preparedness in the director's chair, served him well his entire career and enabled him to keep working into his 90s even when his movies weren't huge moneymakers.
2. High Plains Drifter (1973)One might have predicted that Clint follow-up the success of Play Misty for Me by directing a western as his second feature, seeing as it's the genre that helped make him a huge star. What one might not have predicted is that he would have made one of the all-time great westerns, playing a stranger (of course) who rides into a mining town to seek revenge on the men who murdered a U.S. Marshal. What the movie doesn't quite come out and say but strongly suggests is that Clint is some kind of ghost or supernatural entity -- the personification of vengeance or the spirit of the murdered Marshal or something like that. The twist gives High Plains Drifter an identity that's totally different from other westerns of the period, and though Clint could play this kind of role in his sleep by this point, it's behind the camera where he really shines. His insistence on shooting on real locations (instead of the backlots the studio requested) and real sets grounds the movie in spite of some of the supernatural trappings and makes the world feel authentic even with its more mythic qualities. I know feelings about this one tend to be a little mixed, but I think Clint made an all-time banger western right out of the gate.
3. The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)Another great western with Eastwood behind the camera, though the story behind this one is a bit more controversial. Adapted from the 1972 book The Rebel Outlaw, Clint plays a farmer turned soldier during the Civil War who becomes a legendary gunfighter (and later outlaw, as the title suggests) after his family is murdered. Philip Kaufman, one of the movie's screenwriters, was originally slated to direct; he completed all of the pre-production and even began shooting but regularly clashed with star Eastwood. The two had radically different approaches; Kaufman wanted the film to be as accurate and detail-oriented as possible, while Eastwood had little patience for such a time-consuming approach and even disagreed with Kaufman's take on the title character. Eventually, Eastwood had Kaufman fired and took over the directing duties, which led to both a significant production fine and a new DGA rule called "The Eastwood Rule" that forbid such a thing from happening again.
Sudden Impact (1983)The only entry of the five Dirty Harry movies directed by Eastwood needs to be on this list because it's arguably his most iconic character (this or the Man With No Name) and the second best of the series. It's quite clear that the screenplay, a rape revenge story about a woman (Sondra Locke) who is assaulted and tracks down her rapists a decade later to kill them one by one, has been retrofitted into a Dirty Harry Callahan movie -- he's practically incidental to the story. That's not a knock against the movie, though, because Eastwood and Locke having parallel plot lines underscores the idea that the murderous vigilante and the trigger-happy cop are two sides of the same coin, mirror reflections of one another divided only by a Thin Blue Line. There's unpleasantness to be found for sure, but I love that between this and Tightrope (a Richard Tuggle film which Eastwood supposedly ghost directed, making it ineligible for this list), Eastwood was really leaning into early-'80s sleaze-core.
Unforgiven (1992)If Clint has only one truly definitive masterpiece as a director, it's this one. While the rest of Eastwood's '80s and early '90s consisted of interesting work (Bird, Heartbreak Ridge) and perfectly good programmers (Pale Rider, The Rookie), it was in 1992 that he came roaring back to mainstream (and Oscar-winning) respectability with Unforgiven, the western to end all westerns. He plays a "reformed" bad guy who is hired to kill some men responsible for disfiguring a woman. Gene Hackman rightfully won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Little Bill, a bastard of a town sheriff who's not entirely in the wrong because that's the kind of movie Unforgiven is -- one that upends pretty much every single trope of the Western genre. Eastwood supposedly got the script in the early '80s but wisely held onto it for a decade; he needed to age into the role more and let the culture catch up to what he wanted to say. If we want to read too deeply into the film -- and really what are we doing here if not that -- a case could be made that it's about Clint doing penance for mistreating women both on screen and off for most of his career. I don't think that's what's actually going on in the movie, but Eastwood has consistently surprised me with his ability to be a thoughtful and even introspective filmmaker.
A Perfect World (1993)Clint followed up the success of Unforgiven with what is still the most underrated movie in his entire filmography, 1993's crime drama A Perfect World. Kevin Costner plays a criminal who goes on the run and takes a young boy hostage with whom he begins to form a bond; Eastwood and Laura Dern are the cops trying to bring down Costner and bring the boy back home. This is a masterful crime drama featuring what might be the best performance Kevin Costner has ever given, and I love that Eastwood took on a supporting role to give Costner the space in the lead, subverting what was his movie star persona at the time to play such a terrible, tragic, complicated, and compelling character. This is a beautiful, haunting film still made within the Hollywood system and one of Eastwood's best.
The Bridges of Madison County (1995)I'm not sure if this is one of Eastwood's most "important" movies, but it's worth including because it demonstrates his versatility as a filmmaker and his willingness to explore material outside of his usual westerns and thrillers, particularly as he got older. Clint Eastwood might be among the last actors you would expect to star in this adaptation of Robert James Waller's 1992 bestseller about the romance between a married Italian woman (Meryl Streep) and a photojournalist for National Geographic who comes to her Iowa town while her family is away and begins a passionate, if ill-fated, love affair. He's even less likely to be the one to direct, but that's exactly what he did after first Steven Spielberg and then Bruce Beresford dropped out. A huge box office success in 1995, Madison County also earned Streep another Best Actress Oscar nomination and made Clint a traditional romantic leading man for the first time in probably two decades. It's the sensitivity with which he directs the story, though, that makes it Essential Eastwood. It's another side of Clint.
Absolute Power (1997)I'm picking this one not because it's the best of Clint's paperback movies (a case could be made), but because it really kicked off his paperback run of the late '90s and early 2000s. After kind of a weird decade behind the camera, he settled into a very comfortable type of potboiler thriller beginning with this one adapted by the great William Goldman in which Clint plays a thief who witnesses the President of the United States (Gene Hackman) commit a murder during a late-night break-in. I love the paperback period (a term I've assigned to those Clint thrillers that demand very little of the audience and are mostly about forward momentum, same as a paperback you'd buy at the airport to read on the plane), but the movies that fall into this camp are rarely very substantive. Absolute Power at least carries with it some leftover '70s paranoia and mistrust of broken institutions, but is essentially a very entertaining and glorified star vehicle. With a cast that also includes Hackman, Laura Linney, Judy Davis, and Ed Harris, I'm not complaining.
Mystic River (2003)After a few years spent in the paperback thriller wilderness (which produced movies like True Crime and Blood Work), Eastwood returned to critical respectability with this Oscar-winning adaptation of Dennis Lehane's novel of the same name. There's a ton of great stuff in Mystic River, a kind of Shakespearean drama about the murder of a young girl ripples through several families and the police in Boston, but I would argue that the two performances that won Academy Awards (Sean Penn for Best Actor and Tim Robbins for Best Supporting) are the weakest elements in an otherwise Very Good Movie. Clint captures a very specific sense of place and never underplays the tragedy of what, in other hands, might have been a more standard revenge thriller. His original score does a ton of the heavy lifting and is among the best he ever contributed to a movie. This kicked off a second (or third) Golden Age of Clint as a filmmaker, during which he did what might be the best work of his career behind the camera.
Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)I don't think I can make a list of Clint Eastwood's essential films that doesn't include this one, a companion piece to his Flags of Our Fathers, which was released the same year and details the WWII Battle of Iwo Jima from the perspective of the American soldiers. It's a good movie but a flawed one. Considerably better is Letters, which looks at the same event from the Japanese point of view and is as haunting and elegiac a war movie as has been made in the last 40 years. I still remember a critic (I can't recall who) referring to Eastwood at the time Letters from Iwo Jiwa was released as the "American Kurosawa" and that always stuck with me: a prolific filmmaker working inside a studio system who consistently produced thoughtful films dealing with issues of regret and redemption in a clean, spare style. Hopefully the critic wasn't using that comparison just because Eastwood had made a Japanese film.
It's rare for an American filmmaker -- particularly one as iconic and identifiably "American" as Eastwood -- to tell a story from the perspective of another country and another culture; it's even rarer for that filmmaker to do it in that country's native language, as Eastwood does here. There is so much depth and ambition to the undertaking of both of these movies that just the fact Eastwood was willing to take it on forced me to rethink him as a director at the time; here was a guy known for wanting to work quickly and cheaply tackling this massive project, two movies about the same event told from differing perspectives, one entirely in Japanese. Both are good, one is basically a masterpiece.
American Sniper (2015)I'll admit that I was not crazy about this movie when it was released in late 2015, but I'm self-aware enough to recognize that part of my resistance to it has to do with the culture wars that sprang up around the film and propelled it to be the biggest and most successful movie of the year and the highest-grossing movie Eastwood ever directed. I was also distracted by the fucking rubber baby, which seemed to me a symbol of Clint's general disinterest in doing the work of directing -- his desire to make movies under budget and under schedule finally culminated in what I perceived as laziness and sloppiness. I know now that Clint hadn't completely lost interest in filmmaking (he made a couple of really good movies after this one, plus a couple of not-so-good movies...looking at you, The 15:17 to Paris) and I can probably dismiss a shortcut like the rubber baby as an unwillingness to worry to much about some of the smaller details. We could argue as to whether or not the baby is a "smaller detail," of course, but you get what I'm saying. I also know that, removed from said culture wars and my own biases, this is a better movie than I gave it credit for being -- an attempt to look at PTSD and what is often considered "moral" violence honestly from a filmmaker who built a career largely on violence.
Juror No. 2 (2024)What may very well end up being 94-year old Clint Eastwood's final work is another of his paperback movies, but it's a real page-turner and one of the best movies of its year. Nicholas Hoult does career-best (to this point) work as a man who winds up serving on the jury of a crime he may or may not have committed himself. If Clint is going to retire after this one, it's a good one on which to go out: not only is it the sort of compelling, well-acted dramatic thriller he's been making for over 50 years, but it also speaks to many of his regular themes and obsessions -- how the wrong people can be railroaded and the broken American systems that allow for injustices to take place. I know that Clint and I don't always agree politically (if you don't believe me, I've got an empty chair I'd like to sell you), but the politics of his films are often more difficult and nuanced than contemporary discourse allows. He has always been impossible to fully pin down, making his work infinitely more interesting and timeless than that of his sometimes reactionary counterparts. He has a deeply complicated legacy, but there's little arguing he's one of the best to ever do it in Hollywood.

Director Essentials: Clint Eastwood Nov 03, 2025
by Patrick BromleyA filmmaker who almost always Makes My Day.
Clint Eastwood is an icon and a legend, one of those movie stars who's recognized solely on a First Name Basis. While he originally made his mark in front of the camera in spaghetti westerns and thrillers like the Dirty Harry franchise, I would argue Clint did his best work as a director rather than as an actor. In fact, I'd argue that of all the actors to make the transition into filmmaking in the last 50 years, Eastwood might claim the top spot considering his range, his longevity, and his ability to tell lasting stories in a spare, clean style. Here are some of his essential movies.
1. Play Misty for Me (1971)Clint's first film as director is a solid little thriller about a California disc jockey who gets Fatal Attraction'd (long before Fatal Attraction was a thing) by a fan played by Jessica Walter, 30 years away from her defining role as matriarch of the Bluth family. Like so many of the movies that followed, his first film is deeply personal and can be interpreted as either a misogynist text in which women be crazy or as a self-reflective study of a toxic man who treats women like shit and must reap what he sows. Either way, it's incredibly revealing about Clint as a person, his complicated relationship to women in his personal life, and his onscreen legacy as the pinnacle of alpha machismo. He's impossible to truly pin down throughout his seven-decade filmography. Play Misty needs to be on the list because it's the one that started it all: his career behind the camera, his thorny personal and gender politics being laid bare in his work, and even his incredibly quick and efficient shooting style -- the movie was brought in days under schedule and $50,000 under budget. This technical expertise learned from greats like Sergio Leone and Don Siegel, plus his total preparedness in the director's chair, served him well his entire career and enabled him to keep working into his 90s even when his movies weren't huge moneymakers.
2. High Plains Drifter (1973)One might have predicted that Clint follow-up the success of Play Misty for Me by directing a western as his second feature, seeing as it's the genre that helped make him a huge star. What one might not have predicted is that he would have made one of the all-time great westerns, playing a stranger (of course) who rides into a mining town to seek revenge on the men who murdered a U.S. Marshal. What the movie doesn't quite come out and say but strongly suggests is that Clint is some kind of ghost or supernatural entity -- the personification of vengeance or the spirit of the murdered Marshal or something like that. The twist gives High Plains Drifter an identity that's totally different from other westerns of the period, and though Clint could play this kind of role in his sleep by this point, it's behind the camera where he really shines. His insistence on shooting on real locations (instead of the backlots the studio requested) and real sets grounds the movie in spite of some of the supernatural trappings and makes the world feel authentic even with its more mythic qualities. I know feelings about this one tend to be a little mixed, but I think Clint made an all-time banger western right out of the gate.
3. The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)Another great western with Eastwood behind the camera, though the story behind this one is a bit more controversial. Adapted from the 1972 book The Rebel Outlaw, Clint plays a farmer turned soldier during the Civil War who becomes a legendary gunfighter (and later outlaw, as the title suggests) after his family is murdered. Philip Kaufman, one of the movie's screenwriters, was originally slated to direct; he completed all of the pre-production and even began shooting but regularly clashed with star Eastwood. The two had radically different approaches; Kaufman wanted the film to be as accurate and detail-oriented as possible, while Eastwood had little patience for such a time-consuming approach and even disagreed with Kaufman's take on the title character. Eventually, Eastwood had Kaufman fired and took over the directing duties, which led to both a significant production fine and a new DGA rule called "The Eastwood Rule" that forbid such a thing from happening again.
Sudden Impact (1983)The only entry of the five Dirty Harry movies directed by Eastwood needs to be on this list because it's arguably his most iconic character (this or the Man With No Name) and the second best of the series. It's quite clear that the screenplay, a rape revenge story about a woman (Sondra Locke) who is assaulted and tracks down her rapists a decade later to kill them one by one, has been retrofitted into a Dirty Harry Callahan movie -- he's practically incidental to the story. That's not a knock against the movie, though, because Eastwood and Locke having parallel plot lines underscores the idea that the murderous vigilante and the trigger-happy cop are two sides of the same coin, mirror reflections of one another divided only by a Thin Blue Line. There's unpleasantness to be found for sure, but I love that between this and Tightrope (a Richard Tuggle film which Eastwood supposedly ghost directed, making it ineligible for this list), Eastwood was really leaning into early-'80s sleaze-core.
Unforgiven (1992)If Clint has only one truly definitive masterpiece as a director, it's this one. While the rest of Eastwood's '80s and early '90s consisted of interesting work (Bird, Heartbreak Ridge) and perfectly good programmers (Pale Rider, The Rookie), it was in 1992 that he came roaring back to mainstream (and Oscar-winning) respectability with Unforgiven, the western to end all westerns. He plays a "reformed" bad guy who is hired to kill some men responsible for disfiguring a woman. Gene Hackman rightfully won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Little Bill, a bastard of a town sheriff who's not entirely in the wrong because that's the kind of movie Unforgiven is -- one that upends pretty much every single trope of the Western genre. Eastwood supposedly got the script in the early '80s but wisely held onto it for a decade; he needed to age into the role more and let the culture catch up to what he wanted to say. If we want to read too deeply into the film -- and really what are we doing here if not that -- a case could be made that it's about Clint doing penance for mistreating women both on screen and off for most of his career. I don't think that's what's actually going on in the movie, but Eastwood has consistently surprised me with his ability to be a thoughtful and even introspective filmmaker.
A Perfect World (1993)Clint followed up the success of Unforgiven with what is still the most underrated movie in his entire filmography, 1993's crime drama A Perfect World. Kevin Costner plays a criminal who goes on the run and takes a young boy hostage with whom he begins to form a bond; Eastwood and Laura Dern are the cops trying to bring down Costner and bring the boy back home. This is a masterful crime drama featuring what might be the best performance Kevin Costner has ever given, and I love that Eastwood took on a supporting role to give Costner the space in the lead, subverting what was his movie star persona at the time to play such a terrible, tragic, complicated, and compelling character. This is a beautiful, haunting film still made within the Hollywood system and one of Eastwood's best.
The Bridges of Madison County (1995)I'm not sure if this is one of Eastwood's most "important" movies, but it's worth including because it demonstrates his versatility as a filmmaker and his willingness to explore material outside of his usual westerns and thrillers, particularly as he got older. Clint Eastwood might be among the last actors you would expect to star in this adaptation of Robert James Waller's 1992 bestseller about the romance between a married Italian woman (Meryl Streep) and a photojournalist for National Geographic who comes to her Iowa town while her family is away and begins a passionate, if ill-fated, love affair. He's even less likely to be the one to direct, but that's exactly what he did after first Steven Spielberg and then Bruce Beresford dropped out. A huge box office success in 1995, Madison County also earned Streep another Best Actress Oscar nomination and made Clint a traditional romantic leading man for the first time in probably two decades. It's the sensitivity with which he directs the story, though, that makes it Essential Eastwood. It's another side of Clint.
Absolute Power (1997)I'm picking this one not because it's the best of Clint's paperback movies (a case could be made), but because it really kicked off his paperback run of the late '90s and early 2000s. After kind of a weird decade behind the camera, he settled into a very comfortable type of potboiler thriller beginning with this one adapted by the great William Goldman in which Clint plays a thief who witnesses the President of the United States (Gene Hackman) commit a murder during a late-night break-in. I love the paperback period (a term I've assigned to those Clint thrillers that demand very little of the audience and are mostly about forward momentum, same as a paperback you'd buy at the airport to read on the plane), but the movies that fall into this camp are rarely very substantive. Absolute Power at least carries with it some leftover '70s paranoia and mistrust of broken institutions, but is essentially a very entertaining and glorified star vehicle. With a cast that also includes Hackman, Laura Linney, Judy Davis, and Ed Harris, I'm not complaining.
Mystic River (2003)After a few years spent in the paperback thriller wilderness (which produced movies like True Crime and Blood Work), Eastwood returned to critical respectability with this Oscar-winning adaptation of Dennis Lehane's novel of the same name. There's a ton of great stuff in Mystic River, a kind of Shakespearean drama about the murder of a young girl ripples through several families and the police in Boston, but I would argue that the two performances that won Academy Awards (Sean Penn for Best Actor and Tim Robbins for Best Supporting) are the weakest elements in an otherwise Very Good Movie. Clint captures a very specific sense of place and never underplays the tragedy of what, in other hands, might have been a more standard revenge thriller. His original score does a ton of the heavy lifting and is among the best he ever contributed to a movie. This kicked off a second (or third) Golden Age of Clint as a filmmaker, during which he did what might be the best work of his career behind the camera.
Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)I don't think I can make a list of Clint Eastwood's essential films that doesn't include this one, a companion piece to his Flags of Our Fathers, which was released the same year and details the WWII Battle of Iwo Jima from the perspective of the American soldiers. It's a good movie but a flawed one. Considerably better is Letters, which looks at the same event from the Japanese point of view and is as haunting and elegiac a war movie as has been made in the last 40 years. I still remember a critic (I can't recall who) referring to Eastwood at the time Letters from Iwo Jiwa was released as the "American Kurosawa" and that always stuck with me: a prolific filmmaker working inside a studio system who consistently produced thoughtful films dealing with issues of regret and redemption in a clean, spare style. Hopefully the critic wasn't using that comparison just because Eastwood had made a Japanese film.
It's rare for an American filmmaker -- particularly one as iconic and identifiably "American" as Eastwood -- to tell a story from the perspective of another country and another culture; it's even rarer for that filmmaker to do it in that country's native language, as Eastwood does here. There is so much depth and ambition to the undertaking of both of these movies that just the fact Eastwood was willing to take it on forced me to rethink him as a director at the time; here was a guy known for wanting to work quickly and cheaply tackling this massive project, two movies about the same event told from differing perspectives, one entirely in Japanese. Both are good, one is basically a masterpiece.
American Sniper (2015)I'll admit that I was not crazy about this movie when it was released in late 2015, but I'm self-aware enough to recognize that part of my resistance to it has to do with the culture wars that sprang up around the film and propelled it to be the biggest and most successful movie of the year and the highest-grossing movie Eastwood ever directed. I was also distracted by the fucking rubber baby, which seemed to me a symbol of Clint's general disinterest in doing the work of directing -- his desire to make movies under budget and under schedule finally culminated in what I perceived as laziness and sloppiness. I know now that Clint hadn't completely lost interest in filmmaking (he made a couple of really good movies after this one, plus a couple of not-so-good movies...looking at you, The 15:17 to Paris) and I can probably dismiss a shortcut like the rubber baby as an unwillingness to worry to much about some of the smaller details. We could argue as to whether or not the baby is a "smaller detail," of course, but you get what I'm saying. I also know that, removed from said culture wars and my own biases, this is a better movie than I gave it credit for being -- an attempt to look at PTSD and what is often considered "moral" violence honestly from a filmmaker who built a career largely on violence.
Juror No. 2 (2024)What may very well end up being 94-year old Clint Eastwood's final work is another of his paperback movies, but it's a real page-turner and one of the best movies of its year. Nicholas Hoult does career-best (to this point) work as a man who winds up serving on the jury of a crime he may or may not have committed himself. If Clint is going to retire after this one, it's a good one on which to go out: not only is it the sort of compelling, well-acted dramatic thriller he's been making for over 50 years, but it also speaks to many of his regular themes and obsessions -- how the wrong people can be railroaded and the broken American systems that allow for injustices to take place. I know that Clint and I don't always agree politically (if you don't believe me, I've got an empty chair I'd like to sell you), but the politics of his films are often more difficult and nuanced than contemporary discourse allows. He has always been impossible to fully pin down, making his work infinitely more interesting and timeless than that of his sometimes reactionary counterparts. He has a deeply complicated legacy, but there's little arguing he's one of the best to ever do it in Hollywood.

Weekend Open Thread Nov 01, 2025

Review: SPLITSVILLE Oct 31, 2025
by Rob DiCristino
A thoughtful, well-composed, artfully constructed comedy. About boning.
It wasn’t too long into Michael Angelo Covino’s Splitsville that I started to notice something curious: It looks great. Not just the actors — though Dakota Johnson and Adria Arjona are certainly stunning — but the visuals. The composition. The framing. The camera movement. Covino directs the film with an intentionality that, when coupled with Adam Newport-Berra’s lively cinematography, actually uses the camera to support its wry, irreverent comedy. I know! It’s insane, right? In an age of blockbuster filmmaking when we’re never sure if two co-stars ever occupied the same physical space at the same time, Splitsville actually mines comedy through blocking, staging, and — in the case of an uproarious extended brawl that rivals the house-trashing sequence from Anora — action! For years, I’ve been operating on the assumption that Game Night’s John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein are the only modern directors who understand that comedy is more than over-the-shoulder improv. Apparently, I was wrong!Thinking back on it, Splitsville’s opening sequence perfectly encapsulates this blend of imaginative staging and unique sensibility: Just over a year into their marriage, Carey (Kyle Marvin, who also shares screenplay credit with Covina) and Ashley (Arjona) attempt a little mobile fellatio while driving on the highway. Things go awry — as they always do; don’t try this — but instead of Carey losing control and crashing the car, it’s actually another car that swerves out of control and flips off the road in front of them. The driver is killed immediately, while the passenger lives just long enough for Ashley to watch her die. As they drive away in stunned silence, Ashley admits that she’s been unfaithful and wants a divorce. Despite Carey’s forgiveness and resolution to work on things, Ashley’s made up her mind. What does Carey do? He pulls to the side of the road, gets out, and walks — yes, walks on foot through dangerous topographical obstacles — to the house that his best friend Paul (Covina) shares with his wife, Julie (Johnson).
Later, while Carey licks his wounds — and, in one of Splitsville’s many full-frontal male nude scenes, after Paul thoroughly checks him for ticks — Julie and Paul admit that marriage is a trap and that theirs is an “open” arrangement. Spiritual monogamy is real, they insist, but physical attraction is more of a moving, malleable concept, and their arrangement makes it possible for them to explore the entire spectrum of sexuality while maintaining their core connection. This is all bullshit, of course — don’t ever let anyone convince you it isn’t — but Carey does manage to get Ashley on board: He’ll stand by her while she burns through a host of new lovers as long as she promises not to divorce him. Along the way, he’ll fall for Julie, help fuck boy Fede (David Castadena) with his resume, and discover why no healthy marriage can possibly stay open for very long. Oh, and he’ll show his dick. Like, a lot. And I don’t know if it’s a prosthetic or Marvin is just showing off, but. Damn. I’d be flashing that thing around if I had it, too.Building off the success of their Cannes darling The Climb, Covino and Marvin present a shaggy but endearing comedy about relationship dynamics that is too busy empathizing with the essential humanity of its characters to ever judge them for their selfish, often repugnant behavior. Other movies might castigate Ashley for abandoning her sweet oaf of a husband so she can go to midnight raves and fuck the phone book, but Splitsville remembers the lessons of David Fincher: People are liars and perverts, and Ashley’s journey of self-discovery will feel familiar to many of us who have found ourselves using self-reinvention as an alternative to meaningful therapy. As Carey, Marvin also gives us a hero whose easy confidence sets him apart from the prototypical rom-com lead: He’s not trying to find himself (he knows exactly who he is) or learn more effusive modes of self-expression (again, his dick is constantly hanging out). He’s just trying to find his place among the liars and perverts — above, under, and inside of them, if at all possible.Splitsville’s humor is just as confident, trading the “Well, That Just Happened” of every overlit Netflix comedy for more incisive, behavioral laughs. Excellent bits about Lorenzo’s Oil, CVS receipts, and Vanilla Sky are thrown away as casually as Ashley’s lovers, and viewers who insist on watching with subtitles — Viewers Like Me — will find a thousand other gags littered amongst the background dialogue. Even Dakota Johnson is having fun in this one, playing the aloof and spoiled Julie with far more aplomb than whatever scatterbrained, overwrought bullshit she was slinging in that awful Materialists. And while Splitsville never gives legitimate sympathy to open relationships or those who practice them — it barely dignifies them with consideration before diving head-first into their contradictions — its final scene does highlight the unexpected bliss of human weakness, the little joys we discover once we accept the futility of imposing rules, traditions, and structures on something as ineffably wild as romantic love.
Splitsville is available on VOD platforms now.

Review: SPLITSVILLE Oct 31, 2025
by Rob DiCristino
A thoughtful, well-composed, artfully constructed comedy. About boning.
It wasn’t too long into Michael Angelo Covino’s Splitsville that I started to notice something curious: It looks great. Not just the actors — though Dakota Johnson and Adria Arjona are certainly stunning — but the visuals. The composition. The framing. The camera movement. Covino directs the film with an intentionality that, when coupled with Adam Newport-Berra’s lively cinematography, actually uses the camera to support its wry, irreverent comedy. I know! It’s insane, right? In an age of blockbuster filmmaking when we’re never sure if two co-stars ever occupied the same physical space at the same time, Splitsville actually mines comedy through blocking, staging, and — in the case of an uproarious extended brawl that rivals the house-trashing sequence from Anora — action! For years, I’ve been operating on the assumption that Game Night’s John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein are the only modern directors who understand that comedy is more than over-the-shoulder improv. Apparently, I was wrong!Thinking back on it, Splitsville’s opening sequence perfectly encapsulates this blend of imaginative staging and unique sensibility: Just over a year into their marriage, Carey (Kyle Marvin, who also shares screenplay credit with Covina) and Ashley (Arjona) attempt a little mobile fellatio while driving on the highway. Things go awry — as they always do; don’t try this — but instead of Carey losing control and crashing the car, it’s actually another car that swerves out of control and flips off the road in front of them. The driver is killed immediately, while the passenger lives just long enough for Ashley to watch her die. As they drive away in stunned silence, Ashley admits that she’s been unfaithful and wants a divorce. Despite Carey’s forgiveness and resolution to work on things, Ashley’s made up her mind. What does Carey do? He pulls to the side of the road, gets out, and walks — yes, walks on foot through dangerous topographical obstacles — to the house that his best friend Paul (Covina) shares with his wife, Julie (Johnson).
Later, while Carey licks his wounds — and, in one of Splitsville’s many full-frontal male nude scenes, after Paul thoroughly checks him for ticks — Julie and Paul admit that marriage is a trap and that theirs is an “open” arrangement. Spiritual monogamy is real, they insist, but physical attraction is more of a moving, malleable concept, and their arrangement makes it possible for them to explore the entire spectrum of sexuality while maintaining their core connection. This is all bullshit, of course — don’t ever let anyone convince you it isn’t — but Carey does manage to get Ashley on board: He’ll stand by her while she burns through a host of new lovers as long as she promises not to divorce him. Along the way, he’ll fall for Julie, help fuck boy Fede (David Castadena) with his resume, and discover why no healthy marriage can possibly stay open for very long. Oh, and he’ll show his dick. Like, a lot. And I don’t know if it’s a prosthetic or Marvin is just showing off, but. Damn. I’d be flashing that thing around if I had it, too.Building off the success of their Cannes darling The Climb, Covino and Marvin present a shaggy but endearing comedy about relationship dynamics that is too busy empathizing with the essential humanity of its characters to ever judge them for their selfish, often repugnant behavior. Other movies might castigate Ashley for abandoning her sweet oaf of a husband so she can go to midnight raves and fuck the phone book, but Splitsville remembers the lessons of David Fincher: People are liars and perverts, and Ashley’s journey of self-discovery will feel familiar to many of us who have found ourselves using self-reinvention as an alternative to meaningful therapy. As Carey, Marvin also gives us a hero whose easy confidence sets him apart from the prototypical rom-com lead: He’s not trying to find himself (he knows exactly who he is) or learn more effusive modes of self-expression (again, his dick is constantly hanging out). He’s just trying to find his place among the liars and perverts — above, under, and inside of them, if at all possible.Splitsville’s humor is just as confident, trading the “Well, That Just Happened” of every overlit Netflix comedy for more incisive, behavioral laughs. Excellent bits about Lorenzo’s Oil, CVS receipts, and Vanilla Sky are thrown away as casually as Ashley’s lovers, and viewers who insist on watching with subtitles — Viewers Like Me — will find a thousand other gags littered amongst the background dialogue. Even Dakota Johnson is having fun in this one, playing the aloof and spoiled Julie with far more aplomb than whatever scatterbrained, overwrought bullshit she was slinging in that awful Materialists. And while Splitsville never gives legitimate sympathy to open relationships or those who practice them — it barely dignifies them with consideration before diving head-first into their contradictions — its final scene does highlight the unexpected bliss of human weakness, the little joys we discover once we accept the futility of imposing rules, traditions, and structures on something as ineffably wild as romantic love.
Splitsville is available on VOD platforms now.

2025 Scary Movie Challenge Day 31 Oct 31, 2025

Reserved Seating: "...These Seats Are Reserved" Oct 30, 2025
The review duo who close out Reserved Seating with a recap of our Scary Movie Month. Thank you all for 9 great years of viewership and support!

2025 Scary Movie Challenge Day 30 Oct 30, 2025

Songs I Love from Scary Movie Month Oct 29, 2025
by Adam RiskeSome spooky tracks to play while you sort your Halloween candy stash.
Song: “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”
From: Christmas Evil
Artist: Larry Farrow and Elaine Norwood

One of the highlights of Scary Movie Month this year was introducing my friend Nathan (Hi Nathan!) to Christmas Evil. That movie just gets better and better to me (did you know Patricia Richardson from Home Improvement is in one scene?) but it made me really ready for the Christmas season, which is a problem because we haven’t even had Halloween yet. And I’m Jewish and shouldn’t be celebrating Christmas but I decided during COVID I deserve both Hanukkah and Christmas (the latter in a commercial/non- religious way). Anyways…this song gets a spotlight during the work Christmas party scene in Christmas Evil and it’s a disco banger. Shazam didn’t know it, so I had to do some sleuthing on IMDB and YouTube (for some reason the movie’s end credits don’t list the songs featured). It was worth the extra work. I especially like the bit starting at the 5:23 mark because that’s when the song really means business, knowwhatimean?
Song: “Seed of Memory”
From: The Devil’s Rejects
Artist: Terry Reid

I revisited The Devil’s Rejects for its 20th anniversary and remain wowed by it. I’m among the fans who think it’s Rob Zombie’s directing masterpiece. It’s a masterclass of manipulating your emotions and juggling tones. This song is pretty haunting and somber as it plays over the end credits. It’s a great choice because it sort of makes you sad and happy at the same time. Like “Oh no the Firefly family’s dead” and “Holy shit we’ve been through a lot, what a relief we don’t have to deal with those damn Fireflys again.” The Devil’s Rejects is so good that I can ignore 3 From Hell in the continuity even though that movie is at least ok. I just wish Zombie stuck to ending this story with The Devil’s Rejects. Double features are cooler than trilogies, knowwhatimean?
Song: “Love Will Tear Us Apart”
From: Donnie Darko
Artist: Joy Division

I’ve always loved Donnie Darko (theatrical cut all the way!) but seeing it again in a theater during Patrick’s Smash Cut series reminded me what a miracle movie it is. Like, how did a filmmaker get this out in a digestible way? It’s a movie that seems so dense that it could only make sense in someone’s head. And how did they edit a perfect theatrical cut that leaves such power and mystery from a director’s cut that explains too much and sucks the oxygen out of the movie? How did they make a movie about 1988 in 2001 that feels more 1988 than 1988 did? I don’t think I knew this song before hearing it during the Halloween party scene in Donnie Darko and I’ve loved it ever since (especially in 2007 when I was all about the Joy Division biopic, Control…which real ones know I can’t watch again until 2027). Holy shit, those opening guitar riffs into the drums! This is why I love music; it activates your emotions so fast and effectively. This is aggressive but welcoming malaise, knowwhatimean?
Song: “Funky Sh*t”
From: Event Horizon
Artist: Prodigy

This video starts out swinging right away because it says it was “Edited by Spaz,” who everyone knows is the dog from Spawn. Pup’s got talent. This song slaps, especially when played over space horror clips from Event Horizon, which has always been a movie I loved but it played especially well for me the past couple viewings. It’s just so well designed and the pacing is great. On a side note: I love Sam Neill in horror movies, but my only issue is he’s so sympathetic as a screen presence that he could do almost anything and I’d be like “I dunno…he isn’t all bad.” I guess he’s a project is what I’m saying. Like I could fix him or something, knowwhatimean?
Song: “Good Man in a Bad Time”
From: Fright Night (1985)
Artist: Ian Hunter

I kicked off Scary Movie Month in a great way by seeing Patrick host a Critic’s Classics screening of Fright Night (1985), which I had never seen before in a theater. It was awesome even though I had to switch seats because a guy sitting next to me was coughing consistently before the movie. I went to the box office to change my assigned seat. When I got back in the theater the guy was looking at me like “You’re a punk.” In other words, I was a good man in a bad time. I know that in my heart. That’s probably why I like Fright Night so much, knowwhatimean?
Song: “Stigmata Martyr”
From: Night of the Demons (1988)
Artist: Bauhaus

I’m not a ‘Sirius XM Dark Wave’ type guy usually (maybe I am though between this and Joy Division?) but this song really kicks ass in the context of its use in Night of the Demons (1988). It’s a demon doing jerky dancing to a strobe light. Yikes. Revisiting Night of the Demons (1988) this month was my magic screening of the movie. I’ve liked it more with every revisit and even though it’s camp, I think it works great in terms of mood and atmosphere. It’s one of the few haunted house movies where you’re like “Yup, some bad shit has really gone down in this place, knowwhatimean?”
Song: “Lay Down My Arms”
From: Pulse (2001)
Artist: Cocco

I’ve said many times on the site that Pulse (2001) is one of the best horror movies of the 2000s. I’ve also said it’s very sad and despairing, which is true but that might be why this song (which plays over the end credits) hits so hard. It feels like a big hug or when you finish a really stressful video game and there’s a celebration screen at the end. I’m thinking of the end of Super Mario Bros. 2 where Mario is sleeping. That’s how I’m starting to feel with this October. I might need to sleep for all of November. I horrored really hard, knowhatimean?
Song: “Over at the Frankenstein Place”
From: The Rocky Horror Picture Show
Artist: Barry Bostwick, Susan Sarandon & Richard O’Brien

In honor of the film’s 50th anniversary, I’ll use my last pick this Scary Movie Month for an underrated tune (by comparison with some of the others from the movie, I mean) that I’ve always liked a lot. How does Susan Sarandon look even more beautiful with a newspaper on her head/covered in rain? Does anyone know when that Strange Journey doc is supposed to be streaming/rentable? I think it’s making the rounds in theaters still, but I missed it in Chicago and want to see it before October ends, knowwhatimean?

FTM 793: THE ROB ZOMBIE MOVIES Oct 29, 2025
Patrick and Mike close out #ScaryMovieMonth by digging through the ditches and burning through the witches.
Download this episode here.
Subscribe to F This Movie! on Apple Podcasts.
Also discussed this episode: The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (1970), Drag Me to Hell (2009), Anguish (1987), Jimmy and Stiggs (2025), The Monkey (2025), Night of the Living Dead (1990)

2025 Scary Movie Challenge Day 29 Oct 29, 2025

Johnny Showtime: Best Seven Word Reviews Oct 28, 2025
by JBSpooky.
Is there anything more entertaining than opening the F This Movie machine in October and breathing deep from the aromatic pool of seven-word horror movie reviews? I think not. What follows are my favorites. No fighting! This judge’s decision is final.Gunther PetersWeapons (2025)My therapist will hear about Aunt Gladys.
Mac McEntireMurders in the Rue Morgue (1932) Alternate universe where everyone smokes a pipe.
MashkeJimmy &; Stiggs (2025)ET Phone Hom...icidal Aliens Vs Stoners Splatterfest
OR:Begos NEVER getting apartment security deposit back.
Aaron KeithSinners (2025)Michael B good and Michael B bad.
Jason StevensThe Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020)Who's the real monster? Booze? Bravado? Taxidermy?
janbottigTogether (2025)Stuck on Bandaids? Franco’s stuck on Brie!
Aaron KeithAttack of the Crab Monsters (1957)You're going to need a bigger pot.
Adam OhSon of Frankenstein (1939)Only slightly less goofy than Young Frankenstein.
Mikko ViinikkaInvasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)This is definitely me writing this review.Chris CooperV/H/S Halloween (2025)Really putting the DIE in Diet Soda.
Matt SollenbergerA Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)As Ohioan, can confirm palm trees everywhere.
WadeGeorge A. Romero's Creepshow (1982)Aren't we all asking, "Where's my cake?"
Reed StricklandSisters (1972)Masterful buildup, bug-nuts ending, split screen sublimation.
Lindsay WilkinsMartin (1977)Ouch, waking up to Grandpa's morning wood.
Andy BishopThe Invisible Man (1933)Guy takes invisibility drug... becomes Bugs Bunny.
Andy BishopThe Invisible Man (2020)I immediately saw right through this asshole.
Aaron KeithThe Masque of the Red Death (1964)Them Satan parties are to die for.
Mac McEntireBram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) Winona? More like Win-YES-a! (I got nothin’)
Paul CalvertWeapons (2025)Class sizes are getting out of control.Brian SagerHouse on Haunted Hill (1959)Let that ghoul roller blade in peace!
WadeThe Blob (1958)Townspeople fret about small details, disbelieve everything.
LukeThe Exorcist III (1990)Ain't no way you're hiding those shears.
Mac McEntireBride of Frankenstein (1935) How often does Pretorius clean those jars?
Ross ReederHalloween II (1981)More afraid of Loomis than Michael Myers.
J.M. VargasJames Whale's Bride of Frankenstein (1935)Shockingly minimal screen time for titular character.
OR:Una O's expressions worthy of "Looney Tunes."OR:Pretorius: "... thought I was alone."; Whale smiles.
WadeGeorge A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968)"They're coming to distribute without royalties, Barbra!"
Mac McEntireMalignant (2021) "Will you get off my back, already?"
Matt SollenbergerNosferatu the Vampyre (1979)Herzog presents the definitive documentary on Kinski.
Ross ReederBlack Sabbath (1963)Karloff would’ve played an amazing Kurt Vonnegut.Brian SagerThe Shining (1980)Why is Jack even carrying his wallet?
J.M. VargasJohn Carpenter's The Thing (1982)Poor Norris' heart just wasn't into it.OR:Unsurprisingly popular choice with hardcore cat lovers.
MookieHeretic (2024)I wonder how this guy handles telemarketers.
Michael PomaroPrince of Darkness (1987)Pleasant to see the presence of Pleasence.
Aaron KeithLair of the White Worm (1988)Donahue got wiggly and I got giggly.
Aaron KeithWhite Zombie (1932)All his zombies white; she not special.
MauricioThe Substance (2024)Quaid eating shrimp might be grossest part.
Adam RiskeMisery (1990)Never trust a person who says "cockadoodie"
Jeremy WickettThe Invisible Man (1933)Invisible Nudity!Raging Blizzards!Unparalleled Shrinky Dink!
MookieThe Crazies (2010)Not discussing the Olyphant in the room.
Jeremy WickettThe Thing from Another World (1951)Taps into America’s greatest fears: foreigners, vegetables.Reed StricklandCasper (1995)Why's Kat's mom's ghost not a cartoon?
Aaron KeithHouse of Wax (1953)Working guillotine seems like an insurance nightmare.
Ross ReederHalloween (1978)Strode Reality never financially recovered from this.
WadeThe Return of the Living Dead (1985)Louisville Slugger slugs Tarman in Louisville... Ironic.
Erich[REC] (2007)Brains in Spain fall mainly in frame.
ErichBug (2006)Michael Shannon is Friedkin' me out, man!
RossPoltergeist II: The Other Side (1986)Nobody fighting over who made this one.
Mikko ViinikkaFrankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)Nick Fury post credit scene surprised me.
Mac McEntireThe Old Dark House (1932) Whale does a "one crazy night" movie.
Reed StricklandMagic (1978)Going Insane and Murdering People for Dummies
William SmithThe First Omen (2024)To quote JB, “I’m no shrinking violet…”WadeThe Masque of the Red Death (1964)Pretty much just Bezos's house during quarantine.
Mikko ViinikkaSon of Dracula (1943)His name's Alucard. Get it? GET IT!?
WadeDawn of the Dead (2004)Creating awareness for proper neonatal zombie care.
WadePoltergeist (1982)JUST LISTED: empty lot, interdimensional portal, skeletons.
Mac McEntireThe Blob (1988) Hold up, was that Del Close? (Blub.)
Charles LewisCasper (1995)One of Dean Cundey’s “just for funsies.”
WadeSleepy Hollow (1999)Everybody's head-taking. What about head-giving?
RossVan Helsing (2004)"Never give up on a movie" counter-argument.
janbottigThe Dead Don’t Die (2019)Fracking breaks planet; Driver breaks fourth wall.
Mikko ViinikkaThe Mummy's Ghost (1944)This movie's just a lot of applesauce.Aaron KeithThe Black Cat (1934)Didn't have much to do with cats.
Paul CalvertPoltergeist (1982)Tobe Hooper goodness. Your house is clean.
MauricioV/H/S: Halloween (2025)No Coke. Cola that kills you o.k.?
Mac McEntireStephen King’s Cat’s Eye (1985) Quitting smoking: Hard. Quitting James Woods: Easy.
Mikko ViinikkaHouse of Frankenstein (1944)See, Russos? Crossover movies can be short.
Adam RiskeHalloween (1978)Loomis knows he nailed that Lonnie prank
Mikko ViinikkaHouse of Dracula (1945)(Nerd voice) “Actually it's Dr. Edelmann's house.”
AlexZeierCarrie (1976)The hair! The fashion! Real period piece.
Chris CeballosThe Amityville Horror (1979)Note to self: remove axes from home.ErichRocky Horror Picture Show (1975)I would listen to the Criminologist's podcast.
KuniderThe Long Walk (2025):That was a weird Amazing Race episode.
MauricioThey Live (1988)Earthlings fortunate bubblegum supplies at record low.
Marcus KillerbyVHS Halloween (2025)Rips off my favorite video from bigmommymilkers.com!
Aaron KeithRepulsion (1965)Still cleaner than my college dorm room.
Aaron KeithVillage of the Damned (1995)These snooty li’l cuties went all klabooey.
MookieThe Cabin in the Woods (2011)Characters from Scooby Doo minus the dog.
WadeGeorge A. Romero's Day of the Dead (1985)And the Bubs shall inherit the Earth.
WadeStuart Gordon's From Beyond (1986)"My pineal"s a grower, not a shower."
Michael PomaroTrauma (1993)Intimacy coordinator had A LOT of questions.
Mikko ViinikkaThe Shining (1980)Jack goes from Wendy's axe-husband to ex-husband.Matt SollenbergerThe Blair Witch Project (1999)Maybe witch just performing preventative dental care?
Reed StricklandFrankenweenie (2012)Charming tale of kids electrocuting dead animals.
Brad L.Weapons (2025)Not the face, NOT THE FACE... dang.
Adam RiskeV/H/S/ Halloween (2025)Feel bad for Kidprint gift certificate purchasers
M. Archer M.The Thing (1982)Norwegian translation: “Norway or the gore way!”
Jeff QuinnHalloween (2007)Who keeps teaching Michael how to drive?
Brian SagerWeapons (2025)It's illegal to padlock an egress door.
Brian BiddleAlone in the Dark (1982)Crazy Old White Men Terrorizing Community--Unrelatable.Reed StricklandRe-Animator (1985)The second-best movie with Psycho's score.
WadeKen Russell's The Lair of the White Worm (1988)"Watched Russell's giant dildo movie.""Which one?"
J.M. VargasHereditary (2018)So? Family drives me up walls too.
Michael PomaroSuspiria (1977)Somehow, Udo Kier gives most measured performance.
Matt SollenbergerDollman vs. Demonic Toys (1993)THIS IS NOT A MOVIE**By posting only a five-word review,I have failed the Scary Movie Challenge,just like this movie has failed to be a movie.
Aaron KeithThe Orphanage (2007)So, can they not smell in Spain?
Aaron KeithThe Curse of Frankenstein (1957)Misleading title, he never said any swears.
MookieHalloween (2018)Laurie Strode so Judy Greer could run.
MunkeeNight if the Creeps (1986)Key to surviving college? Shut your mouth.
Chris CooperChildren of the Corn: Genesis (2011)There was a distinct lack of corn.
Rocco T. ThompsonClown in a Cornfield (2025)Many clown. Much cornfield. Truth in advertising.
This has been a terrific Scary Movie Month. Thanks to all of our loyal listeners and readers for making it so. And there’s still three-and-half days left. I know we are all going to bear down and GET THAT REVIEW COUNT to 10,000!

Johnny Showtime: Best Seven Word Reviews Oct 28, 2025
by JBSpooky.
Is there anything more entertaining than opening the F This Movie machine in October and breathing deep from the aromatic pool of seven-word horror movie reviews? I think not. What follows are my favorites. No fighting! This judge’s decision is final.Gunther PetersWeapons (2025)My therapist will hear about Aunt Gladys.
Mac McEntireMurders in the Rue Morgue (1932) Alternate universe where everyone smokes a pipe.
MashkeJimmy &; Stiggs (2025)ET Phone Hom...icidal Aliens Vs Stoners Splatterfest
OR:Begos NEVER getting apartment security deposit back.
Aaron KeithSinners (2025)Michael B good and Michael B bad.
Jason StevensThe Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020)Who's the real monster? Booze? Bravado? Taxidermy?
janbottigTogether (2025)Stuck on Bandaids? Franco’s stuck on Brie!
Aaron KeithAttack of the Crab Monsters (1957)You're going to need a bigger pot.
Adam OhSon of Frankenstein (1939)Only slightly less goofy than Young Frankenstein.
Mikko ViinikkaInvasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)This is definitely me writing this review.Chris CooperV/H/S Halloween (2025)Really putting the DIE in Diet Soda.
Matt SollenbergerA Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)As Ohioan, can confirm palm trees everywhere.
WadeGeorge A. Romero's Creepshow (1982)Aren't we all asking, "Where's my cake?"
Reed StricklandSisters (1972)Masterful buildup, bug-nuts ending, split screen sublimation.
Lindsay WilkinsMartin (1977)Ouch, waking up to Grandpa's morning wood.
Andy BishopThe Invisible Man (1933)Guy takes invisibility drug... becomes Bugs Bunny.
Andy BishopThe Invisible Man (2020)I immediately saw right through this asshole.
Aaron KeithThe Masque of the Red Death (1964)Them Satan parties are to die for.
Mac McEntireBram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) Winona? More like Win-YES-a! (I got nothin’)
Paul CalvertWeapons (2025)Class sizes are getting out of control.Brian SagerHouse on Haunted Hill (1959)Let that ghoul roller blade in peace!
WadeThe Blob (1958)Townspeople fret about small details, disbelieve everything.
LukeThe Exorcist III (1990)Ain't no way you're hiding those shears.
Mac McEntireBride of Frankenstein (1935) How often does Pretorius clean those jars?
Ross ReederHalloween II (1981)More afraid of Loomis than Michael Myers.
J.M. VargasJames Whale's Bride of Frankenstein (1935)Shockingly minimal screen time for titular character.
OR:Una O's expressions worthy of "Looney Tunes."OR:Pretorius: "... thought I was alone."; Whale smiles.
WadeGeorge A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968)"They're coming to distribute without royalties, Barbra!"
Mac McEntireMalignant (2021) "Will you get off my back, already?"
Matt SollenbergerNosferatu the Vampyre (1979)Herzog presents the definitive documentary on Kinski.
Ross ReederBlack Sabbath (1963)Karloff would’ve played an amazing Kurt Vonnegut.Brian SagerThe Shining (1980)Why is Jack even carrying his wallet?
J.M. VargasJohn Carpenter's The Thing (1982)Poor Norris' heart just wasn't into it.OR:Unsurprisingly popular choice with hardcore cat lovers.
MookieHeretic (2024)I wonder how this guy handles telemarketers.
Michael PomaroPrince of Darkness (1987)Pleasant to see the presence of Pleasence.
Aaron KeithLair of the White Worm (1988)Donahue got wiggly and I got giggly.
Aaron KeithWhite Zombie (1932)All his zombies white; she not special.
MauricioThe Substance (2024)Quaid eating shrimp might be grossest part.
Adam RiskeMisery (1990)Never trust a person who says "cockadoodie"
Jeremy WickettThe Invisible Man (1933)Invisible Nudity!Raging Blizzards!Unparalleled Shrinky Dink!
MookieThe Crazies (2010)Not discussing the Olyphant in the room.
Jeremy WickettThe Thing from Another World (1951)Taps into America’s greatest fears: foreigners, vegetables.Reed StricklandCasper (1995)Why's Kat's mom's ghost not a cartoon?
Aaron KeithHouse of Wax (1953)Working guillotine seems like an insurance nightmare.
Ross ReederHalloween (1978)Strode Reality never financially recovered from this.
WadeThe Return of the Living Dead (1985)Louisville Slugger slugs Tarman in Louisville... Ironic.
Erich[REC] (2007)Brains in Spain fall mainly in frame.
ErichBug (2006)Michael Shannon is Friedkin' me out, man!
RossPoltergeist II: The Other Side (1986)Nobody fighting over who made this one.
Mikko ViinikkaFrankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)Nick Fury post credit scene surprised me.
Mac McEntireThe Old Dark House (1932) Whale does a "one crazy night" movie.
Reed StricklandMagic (1978)Going Insane and Murdering People for Dummies
William SmithThe First Omen (2024)To quote JB, “I’m no shrinking violet…”WadeThe Masque of the Red Death (1964)Pretty much just Bezos's house during quarantine.
Mikko ViinikkaSon of Dracula (1943)His name's Alucard. Get it? GET IT!?
WadeDawn of the Dead (2004)Creating awareness for proper neonatal zombie care.
WadePoltergeist (1982)JUST LISTED: empty lot, interdimensional portal, skeletons.
Mac McEntireThe Blob (1988) Hold up, was that Del Close? (Blub.)
Charles LewisCasper (1995)One of Dean Cundey’s “just for funsies.”
WadeSleepy Hollow (1999)Everybody's head-taking. What about head-giving?
RossVan Helsing (2004)"Never give up on a movie" counter-argument.
janbottigThe Dead Don’t Die (2019)Fracking breaks planet; Driver breaks fourth wall.
Mikko ViinikkaThe Mummy's Ghost (1944)This movie's just a lot of applesauce.Aaron KeithThe Black Cat (1934)Didn't have much to do with cats.
Paul CalvertPoltergeist (1982)Tobe Hooper goodness. Your house is clean.
MauricioV/H/S: Halloween (2025)No Coke. Cola that kills you o.k.?
Mac McEntireStephen King’s Cat’s Eye (1985) Quitting smoking: Hard. Quitting James Woods: Easy.
Mikko ViinikkaHouse of Frankenstein (1944)See, Russos? Crossover movies can be short.
Adam RiskeHalloween (1978)Loomis knows he nailed that Lonnie prank
Mikko ViinikkaHouse of Dracula (1945)(Nerd voice) “Actually it's Dr. Edelmann's house.”
AlexZeierCarrie (1976)The hair! The fashion! Real period piece.
Chris CeballosThe Amityville Horror (1979)Note to self: remove axes from home.ErichRocky Horror Picture Show (1975)I would listen to the Criminologist's podcast.
KuniderThe Long Walk (2025):That was a weird Amazing Race episode.
MauricioThey Live (1988)Earthlings fortunate bubblegum supplies at record low.
Marcus KillerbyVHS Halloween (2025)Rips off my favorite video from bigmommymilkers.com!
Aaron KeithRepulsion (1965)Still cleaner than my college dorm room.
Aaron KeithVillage of the Damned (1995)These snooty li’l cuties went all klabooey.
MookieThe Cabin in the Woods (2011)Characters from Scooby Doo minus the dog.
WadeGeorge A. Romero's Day of the Dead (1985)And the Bubs shall inherit the Earth.
WadeStuart Gordon's From Beyond (1986)"My pineal"s a grower, not a shower."
Michael PomaroTrauma (1993)Intimacy coordinator had A LOT of questions.
Mikko ViinikkaThe Shining (1980)Jack goes from Wendy's axe-husband to ex-husband.Matt SollenbergerThe Blair Witch Project (1999)Maybe witch just performing preventative dental care?
Reed StricklandFrankenweenie (2012)Charming tale of kids electrocuting dead animals.
Brad L.Weapons (2025)Not the face, NOT THE FACE... dang.
Adam RiskeV/H/S/ Halloween (2025)Feel bad for Kidprint gift certificate purchasers
M. Archer M.The Thing (1982)Norwegian translation: “Norway or the gore way!”
Jeff QuinnHalloween (2007)Who keeps teaching Michael how to drive?
Brian SagerWeapons (2025)It's illegal to padlock an egress door.
Brian BiddleAlone in the Dark (1982)Crazy Old White Men Terrorizing Community--Unrelatable.Reed StricklandRe-Animator (1985)The second-best movie with Psycho's score.
WadeKen Russell's The Lair of the White Worm (1988)"Watched Russell's giant dildo movie.""Which one?"
J.M. VargasHereditary (2018)So? Family drives me up walls too.
Michael PomaroSuspiria (1977)Somehow, Udo Kier gives most measured performance.
Matt SollenbergerDollman vs. Demonic Toys (1993)THIS IS NOT A MOVIE**By posting only a five-word review,I have failed the Scary Movie Challenge,just like this movie has failed to be a movie.
Aaron KeithThe Orphanage (2007)So, can they not smell in Spain?
Aaron KeithThe Curse of Frankenstein (1957)Misleading title, he never said any swears.
MookieHalloween (2018)Laurie Strode so Judy Greer could run.
MunkeeNight if the Creeps (1986)Key to surviving college? Shut your mouth.
Chris CooperChildren of the Corn: Genesis (2011)There was a distinct lack of corn.
Rocco T. ThompsonClown in a Cornfield (2025)Many clown. Much cornfield. Truth in advertising.
This has been a terrific Scary Movie Month. Thanks to all of our loyal listeners and readers for making it so. And there’s still three-and-half days left. I know we are all going to bear down and GET THAT REVIEW COUNT to 10,000!

2025 Scary Movie Challenge Day 28 Oct 28, 2025

10 International Horror Movies I Need to See Oct 27, 2025
by Patrick BromleyHorror can be just as scary with subtitles.
I was trying to think of a piece to write for the end of the month and coming up with nothing, so I took social media to see if anyone had any ideas. I lucked out and this article was born! I'm sure this list will make it seem like I haven't seen many international horror movies, which I promise is not the case, though in several instances below you'll see I have no excuse because we own some of these on Blu-ray and I just haven't watched them yet. I'm going to try and see all of these before next Scary Movie Month. Well, most of them. Some, maybe. Just Pulse.
Thank you to Manuel Clavel on BlueSky for the suggestion!
1. Pulse (2001, dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa)In addition to Manuel's suggestion on social media, this is the movie that more or less inspired this list because Adam Riske just talked about it on the last show and I mentioned that I still have never seen it. Imagine my excitement to realize we own the Blu-ray! Now I have no excuse but to watch what I understand to be one of the crowing achievements of the J-Horror movement of the early 2000s and a movie I'm told is deeply, profoundly sad. What a way to close out October!
2. Pin (1988, dir. Sandor Stern)This psychological horror film from Canada has been on my radar since reading Psychos! Sickos! Sequels! in the 1990s, at that time my go-to book about '80s horror. It wasn't even a great book, but at the time in my life when I first bought it from Tower Records and would read it obsessively alone at a Taco Bell, it was exactly what I needed to turn me on to some new films and get me to revisit some I had seen but maybe not given a proper chance. This one was pretty hard to see for a number of years but has maybe gotten easier thanks to streaming? (Checks Amazon) Nope! Just an OOP DVD. But it does star David Hewlett from my beloved Stargate Atlantis so it's my mission to track a copy down some time in the next year.
3. Thirst (2009, dir. Park Chan-wook)Another one we own on Blu-ray, meaning I have no reason for having not already seen it. Plus it's Park Chan-wook, one of my favorite South Korean directors, making a vampire movie! I know it wasn't as well-received as some of his other films upon release, but I also know there are a lot of people who really dig this movie and a cult has developed around it. I know the movie is about a priest who becomes a vampire and falls in love and I wonder if the religious angle kept me away? Probably not. I think I just never got to it. Have I seen Verotika several times, though? Stop asking so many questions.
4. Viy (1967, dirs. Konstantin Yershov and Georgi Kropachyov)This is a 1967 Russian folk horror movie that I only even became aware of when Severin released it on Blu-ray a couple years back. Folk horror is a pretty big blind spot for me and Russian cinema is an even bigger blind spot, so it makes sense that I've missed this movie up to this point. Wait, do I own this one too? (Checks the shelves) I do! Viy is included as part of the All the Haunts Be Ours box, which we do have. That means I can watch it! This screenshot makes me want to.
5. Cronos (1992, dir. Guillermo del Toro)I'm weirdly ashamed to admit that I've never seen this Guillermo del Toro-directed horror movie, one of only two GDT movies I have yet to see (the other is his animated Pinocchio -- well, and his upcoming adaptation of Frankenstein hitting Netflix in a few weeks, but at least I have an excuse of that one as it's not out yet). I remember this being the movie that put him on the map back in the 1990s and is one I've always meant to check out, especially seeing as it sounds more up my alley than a lot of his other work. The older I get, the more movies he makes, the more I have to come to terms with the fact that del Toro is not really one of my guys (sorry Mike). I. think he's great and I'm so glad he exists but I don't connect with his work all that often. Maybe this one will be different!
6. Macabre (2009, dirs. Kimo Stamboel & Timo Tjahjanto)I have no excuse. I'm a big Timo Tjahjanto guy and my understanding is that this is a loose Indonesian remake of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, one of the best horror movies ever made. For that reason alone I should have seen this already. I think I started watching it once years ago when it was on Netflix but never finished it (not because I didn't like it, just ran out of time) and nowadays it's not readily available for streaming in the US. This is where I must invoke the snooze/lose clause.
7. The Phantom Carriage (1921, dir. Victor Sjöström) I know there's a Criterion release of this silent Swedish horror film and that it's considered a classic and blah blah blah, but it was almost completely off my radar until I heard it talked about on a recent episode of Destroy the Brain (one of my favorite horror podcasts) discussing silent horror. It sounds rad: the specter of Death drives a carriage (a Phantom one) and forces a drunk to litigate his past mistakes on New Year's Eve. It's like Sweden's take on A Christmas Carol, minus an aged-up Johnny Depp. Maybe I can pick it up during the next Barnes & Noble sale.
8. In My Skin (2002, dir. Marina de Van)I feel like this is one of the movies I've heard tell has made people pass out in the past. I know it's French and I know it's fairly extreme even though I don't think it's considered part of the New French Extremism (most of the entries of which I've already seen). Maybe it is? I'm clueless. Director de Van stars as a woman who suffers an injury and begins slowly mutilating herself. I suspect this would be a tough watch but I have friends who speak very highly of it and I need to see it for myself. Double feature with Raw!
9. Day of the Best (1995, dir. Álex de la Iglesia)Every time I watch a movie from Spanish director Álex de la Iglesia, I have the same thought: I love this filmmaker because I have no idea how to categorize his work or where his movies are going to go. I literally just finished watching The Last Circus and thought it was great, so I absolutely need to see what it considered to be one of his best (if not his very best) movies. This is another one we've had on our shelves for a couple of years but then I forget that it's there and end up watching Kuffs again. I know he has so many movies and has worked across so many genres but I'm really only aware of his work in horror. What other de la Iglesia movies do I need to see?
10. Luz (2018, dir. Tillman Singer)This German horror is one I know pretty much in name only. I remember it making quite a bit of noise a few years ago among my friends who are into the artier side of horror but never even took the time to educate myself on the movie or what it's about. Apparently, it's about a cab driver who is interrogated by a hypnotist who might be more than he lets on. I did see director Tillman Singer's follow-up movie, last year's Cuckoo, and have to admit that I didn't connect with it much. Maybe I'll have better luck with his first feature.
Which ones am I missing?

10 International Horror Movies I Need to See Oct 27, 2025
by Patrick BromleyHorror can be just as scary with subtitles.
I was trying to think of a piece to write for the end of the month and coming up with nothing, so I took social media to see if anyone had any ideas. I lucked out and this article was born! I'm sure this list will make it seem like I haven't seen many international horror movies, which I promise is not the case, though in several instances below you'll see I have no excuse because we own some of these on Blu-ray and I just haven't watched them yet. I'm going to try and see all of these before next Scary Movie Month. Well, most of them. Some, maybe. Just Pulse.
Thank you to Manuel Clavel on BlueSky for the suggestion!
1. Pulse (2001, dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa)In addition to Manuel's suggestion on social media, this is the movie that more or less inspired this list because Adam Riske just talked about it on the last show and I mentioned that I still have never seen it. Imagine my excitement to realize we own the Blu-ray! Now I have no excuse but to watch what I understand to be one of the crowing achievements of the J-Horror movement of the early 2000s and a movie I'm told is deeply, profoundly sad. What a way to close out October!
2. Pin (1988, dir. Sandor Stern)This psychological horror film from Canada has been on my radar since reading Psychos! Sickos! Sequels! in the 1990s, at that time my go-to book about '80s horror. It wasn't even a great book, but at the time in my life when I first bought it from Tower Records and would read it obsessively alone at a Taco Bell, it was exactly what I needed to turn me on to some new films and get me to revisit some I had seen but maybe not given a proper chance. This one was pretty hard to see for a number of years but has maybe gotten easier thanks to streaming? (Checks Amazon) Nope! Just an OOP DVD. But it does star David Hewlett from my beloved Stargate Atlantis so it's my mission to track a copy down some time in the next year.
3. Thirst (2009, dir. Park Chan-wook)Another one we own on Blu-ray, meaning I have no reason for having not already seen it. Plus it's Park Chan-wook, one of my favorite South Korean directors, making a vampire movie! I know it wasn't as well-received as some of his other films upon release, but I also know there are a lot of people who really dig this movie and a cult has developed around it. I know the movie is about a priest who becomes a vampire and falls in love and I wonder if the religious angle kept me away? Probably not. I think I just never got to it. Have I seen Verotika several times, though? Stop asking so many questions.
4. Viy (1967, dirs. Konstantin Yershov and Georgi Kropachyov)This is a 1967 Russian folk horror movie that I only even became aware of when Severin released it on Blu-ray a couple years back. Folk horror is a pretty big blind spot for me and Russian cinema is an even bigger blind spot, so it makes sense that I've missed this movie up to this point. Wait, do I own this one too? (Checks the shelves) I do! Viy is included as part of the All the Haunts Be Ours box, which we do have. That means I can watch it! This screenshot makes me want to.
5. Cronos (1992, dir. Guillermo del Toro)I'm weirdly ashamed to admit that I've never seen this Guillermo del Toro-directed horror movie, one of only two GDT movies I have yet to see (the other is his animated Pinocchio -- well, and his upcoming adaptation of Frankenstein hitting Netflix in a few weeks, but at least I have an excuse of that one as it's not out yet). I remember this being the movie that put him on the map back in the 1990s and is one I've always meant to check out, especially seeing as it sounds more up my alley than a lot of his other work. The older I get, the more movies he makes, the more I have to come to terms with the fact that del Toro is not really one of my guys (sorry Mike). I. think he's great and I'm so glad he exists but I don't connect with his work all that often. Maybe this one will be different!
6. Macabre (2009, dirs. Kimo Stamboel & Timo Tjahjanto)I have no excuse. I'm a big Timo Tjahjanto guy and my understanding is that this is a loose Indonesian remake of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, one of the best horror movies ever made. For that reason alone I should have seen this already. I think I started watching it once years ago when it was on Netflix but never finished it (not because I didn't like it, just ran out of time) and nowadays it's not readily available for streaming in the US. This is where I must invoke the snooze/lose clause.
7. The Phantom Carriage (1921, dir. Victor Sjöström) I know there's a Criterion release of this silent Swedish horror film and that it's considered a classic and blah blah blah, but it was almost completely off my radar until I heard it talked about on a recent episode of Destroy the Brain (one of my favorite horror podcasts) discussing silent horror. It sounds rad: the specter of Death drives a carriage (a Phantom one) and forces a drunk to litigate his past mistakes on New Year's Eve. It's like Sweden's take on A Christmas Carol, minus an aged-up Johnny Depp. Maybe I can pick it up during the next Barnes & Noble sale.
8. In My Skin (2002, dir. Marina de Van)I feel like this is one of the movies I've heard tell has made people pass out in the past. I know it's French and I know it's fairly extreme even though I don't think it's considered part of the New French Extremism (most of the entries of which I've already seen). Maybe it is? I'm clueless. Director de Van stars as a woman who suffers an injury and begins slowly mutilating herself. I suspect this would be a tough watch but I have friends who speak very highly of it and I need to see it for myself. Double feature with Raw!
9. Day of the Best (1995, dir. Álex de la Iglesia)Every time I watch a movie from Spanish director Álex de la Iglesia, I have the same thought: I love this filmmaker because I have no idea how to categorize his work or where his movies are going to go. I literally just finished watching The Last Circus and thought it was great, so I absolutely need to see what it considered to be one of his best (if not his very best) movies. This is another one we've had on our shelves for a couple of years but then I forget that it's there and end up watching Kuffs again. I know he has so many movies and has worked across so many genres but I'm really only aware of his work in horror. What other de la Iglesia movies do I need to see?
10. Luz (2018, dir. Tillman Singer)This German horror is one I know pretty much in name only. I remember it making quite a bit of noise a few years ago among my friends who are into the artier side of horror but never even took the time to educate myself on the movie or what it's about. Apparently, it's about a cab driver who is interrogated by a hypnotist who might be more than he lets on. I did see director Tillman Singer's follow-up movie, last year's Cuckoo, and have to admit that I didn't connect with it much. Maybe I'll have better luck with his first feature.
Which ones am I missing?

2025 Scary Movie Month Challenge Day 27 Oct 27, 2025

2025 Scary Movie Challenge Day 26 Oct 26, 2025

2025 Scary Movie Challenge Day 25 Oct 25, 2025

Review: REGRETTING YOU Oct 24, 2025
by Rob DiCristino
Gas leak cinema.
The 34th Philadelphia Film Festival is in full effect this week! Centerpiece film premieres include Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon and Nouvelle Vague, Gus Van Sant’s Dead Man’s Wire, Park Chan-Wook’s No Other Choice, and my most personally anticipated film of the year, Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value. The festival will also feature celebrity appearances from Johnson, Lucy Liu, and Philadelphia’s own Bradley Cooper! There will be parties! Panels! Q&As! Food! Drink! Dance-offs! Forums with esteemed members of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle (Hey, I’m in that!)! The Philadelphia Film Society is also hosting filmmaker meet-ups and community outreach events for students interested in learning more about the film industry. From nascent beginnings, the PFF has truly grown into one of the most anticipated film events on the East Coast.Anyway, we’ve been too busy to do any of that, so instead we went to a press screening of Regretting You, the new romantic drama based on the 2019 novel by It Ends with Us’ Colleen Hoover. Directed by Josh Boone (The Fault in Our Stars, The New Mutants), Regretting You opens with soon-to-be graduates Morgan (a plastic, de-aged Allison Williams), Jonah (a plastic, de-aged Dave Franco), Jenny (A plastic, de-aged Willa Fitzgerald), and Chris (a plastic, de-aged Scott Eastwood) on their way to their latest beachside blowout. Because movies need conflicts, Morgan is dating doofy frat-bro Chris rather than the sensitive and intelligent Jonah — He also wears glasses, so add “mysterious” — who’s clearly settled for her sister Jenny as a consolation prize. Just as Jonah and Morgan seem poised to correct their error and bone down, Morgan reveals that she’s pregnant with Chris’ baby. Seventeen years later, their daughter Clara (Mckenna Grace) navigates a romance with hunky cinephile Miller (Mason Thames).
There’s way more plot to summarize — Hint: two of these characters will be dead before we’re halfway through this 120-minute slog — but I’ll be damned if I’m going to work harder to make sense of Regretting You than screenwriter Susan McMartin ever did. Suffice to say that it’s a movie with a hole in its head, an incoherent tangle of cliches assembled with such disregard for tone, mood, and continuity that you’ll wonder if you’re actually just nodding off and waking back up during a marathon of Lifetime originals. Take Dave Franco’s Jonah: He skipped town after Morgan and Chris married, reappearing at some point to impregnate Jenny and start teaching at Clara’s high school (?). Their son Elijah is roughly a year old when Jonah and Morgan have their first conversion about these events (?), despite the fact that Morgan has been babysitting for them with some frequency (?). With these and other logistics left unexplored, Jonah’s major narrative function is stumbling into Morgan’s house at random intervals looking forlorn. Seriously, though. Try to keep track of how often it happens. You’ll lose count!The character who comes closest to resembling a human being is probably Clara, if only because teenage behavior is, by definition, nonsensical and ill-informed. A veteran of the high school stage, Clara dreams of attending drama school, though her mother would prefer she find a more stable career. Don’t worry about it, because Morgan will eventually come around to supporting her daughter’s dream after watching a recording of a two-year-old performance that she presumably attended live in the first place (?). Morgan had to learn the value of pursuing her passions, I suppose, which she does by remodeling her kitchen and having sex with a man she had no tangible reason not to have sex with in the first place. But whatever; we’re talking about Clara. What’s good about Clara? Oh! She and Miller watch Clueless at one point during their Young Love Tropes speed run, reminding me that other, better movies still exist. What else? Well, Mckenna Grace is the only one who doesn’t look like she’s acting with a gun to her head, so if nothing else, Regretting You should help the Ghostbusters star secure more work.Oh, shit. Before I forget: Regretting You does the Sherlock “text messages on the screen” thing, but then also has the characters narrate the messages in voice over. Who is that for? And why does it never occur to Clara that her father and aunt might have died in the same car accident — Ah, fuck it. Spoilers: Chris and Jenny were having an affair, and Chris likely fathered Elijah — until the very end of the movie? They died on the same day! Did she just never wonder about how that happened? Was Colleen Hoover hoping no one would notice that the central dramatic conceit of the entire story was faulty, or did she just think we’re all too stupid to care? Is there some sort of explanation in the book? Did anyone read this book? Am I going insane? Honestly, our audience was hooting and hollering when all this was “revealed,” so what the hell do I know about human behavior? Maybe this is actually the great romance of our time. Oh, wait! Guys! Clancy Brown is in this movie! No, I don’t know why. It couldn't matter less.
Regretting You hits U.S. theaters on Friday, October 24th.

Review: REGRETTING YOU Oct 24, 2025
by Rob DiCristino
Gas leak cinema.
The 34th Philadelphia Film Festival is in full effect this week! Centerpiece film premieres include Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon and Nouvelle Vague, Gus Van Sant’s Dead Man’s Wire, Park Chan-Wook’s No Other Choice, and my most personally anticipated film of the year, Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value. The festival will also feature celebrity appearances from Johnson, Lucy Liu, and Philadelphia’s own Bradley Cooper! There will be parties! Panels! Q&As! Food! Drink! Dance-offs! Forums with esteemed members of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle (Hey, I’m in that!)! The Philadelphia Film Society is also hosting filmmaker meet-ups and community outreach events for students interested in learning more about the film industry. From nascent beginnings, the PFF has truly grown into one of the most anticipated film events on the East Coast.Anyway, we’ve been too busy to do any of that, so instead we went to a press screening of Regretting You, the new romantic drama based on the 2019 novel by It Ends with Us’ Colleen Hoover. Directed by Josh Boone (The Fault in Our Stars, The New Mutants), Regretting You opens with soon-to-be graduates Morgan (a plastic, de-aged Allison Williams), Jonah (a plastic, de-aged Dave Franco), Jenny (A plastic, de-aged Willa Fitzgerald), and Chris (a plastic, de-aged Scott Eastwood) on their way to their latest beachside blowout. Because movies need conflicts, Morgan is dating doofy frat-bro Chris rather than the sensitive and intelligent Jonah — He also wears glasses, so add “mysterious” — who’s clearly settled for her sister Jenny as a consolation prize. Just as Jonah and Morgan seem poised to correct their error and bone down, Morgan reveals that she’s pregnant with Chris’ baby. Seventeen years later, their daughter Clara (Mckenna Grace) navigates a romance with hunky cinephile Miller (Mason Thames).
There’s way more plot to summarize — Hint: two of these characters will be dead before we’re halfway through this 120-minute slog — but I’ll be damned if I’m going to work harder to make sense of Regretting You than screenwriter Susan McMartin ever did. Suffice to say that it’s a movie with a hole in its head, an incoherent tangle of cliches assembled with such disregard for tone, mood, and continuity that you’ll wonder if you’re actually just nodding off and waking back up during a marathon of Lifetime originals. Take Dave Franco’s Jonah: He skipped town after Morgan and Chris married, reappearing at some point to impregnate Jenny and start teaching at Clara’s high school (?). Their son Elijah is roughly a year old when Jonah and Morgan have their first conversion about these events (?), despite the fact that Morgan has been babysitting for them with some frequency (?). With these and other logistics left unexplored, Jonah’s major narrative function is stumbling into Morgan’s house at random intervals looking forlorn. Seriously, though. Try to keep track of how often it happens. You’ll lose count!The character who comes closest to resembling a human being is probably Clara, if only because teenage behavior is, by definition, nonsensical and ill-informed. A veteran of the high school stage, Clara dreams of attending drama school, though her mother would prefer she find a more stable career. Don’t worry about it, because Morgan will eventually come around to supporting her daughter’s dream after watching a recording of a two-year-old performance that she presumably attended live in the first place (?). Morgan had to learn the value of pursuing her passions, I suppose, which she does by remodeling her kitchen and having sex with a man she had no tangible reason not to have sex with in the first place. But whatever; we’re talking about Clara. What’s good about Clara? Oh! She and Miller watch Clueless at one point during their Young Love Tropes speed run, reminding me that other, better movies still exist. What else? Well, Mckenna Grace is the only one who doesn’t look like she’s acting with a gun to her head, so if nothing else, Regretting You should help the Ghostbusters star secure more work.Oh, shit. Before I forget: Regretting You does the Sherlock “text messages on the screen” thing, but then also has the characters narrate the messages in voice over. Who is that for? And why does it never occur to Clara that her father and aunt might have died in the same car accident — Ah, fuck it. Spoilers: Chris and Jenny were having an affair, and Chris likely fathered Elijah — until the very end of the movie? They died on the same day! Did she just never wonder about how that happened? Was Colleen Hoover hoping no one would notice that the central dramatic conceit of the entire story was faulty, or did she just think we’re all too stupid to care? Is there some sort of explanation in the book? Did anyone read this book? Am I going insane? Honestly, our audience was hooting and hollering when all this was “revealed,” so what the hell do I know about human behavior? Maybe this is actually the great romance of our time. Oh, wait! Guys! Clancy Brown is in this movie! No, I don’t know why. It couldn't matter less.
Regretting You hits U.S. theaters on Friday, October 24th.

2025 Scary Movie Challenge Day 24 Oct 24, 2025

Reserved Seating: "Until Next Time..." Oct 23, 2025
The review duo who look back on 9 years of Reserved Seating for our penultimate episode.

2025 Scary Movie Challenge Oct 23, 2025

FTM 792: ERNEST SCARED STUPID Oct 22, 2025
Patrick and Adam Riske don't need to get scared, they're already stupid, KnowWhatIMean?
Download this episode here.
Subscribe to F This Movie! on Apple Podcasts.
Also discussed this episode: The Fetus (2025), Spooktacular (2025), I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025), The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966), When a Stranger Calls (1979), Pulse (2005), Three...Extremes (2005), Chain Reactions (2025), Ghost in the Machine (1993), $lasher$ (2001)

2025 Scary Movie Challenge Day 22 Oct 22, 2025

Johnny Showtime: CORPSE BRIDE Oct 21, 2025
by JB
“We all end up the remains of the day...”
One of the many perks of Scary Movie Month is the chance to enjoy select horror films in honest-to-goodness movie theaters. Fathom Events, as well as individual theater chains such as AMC, smelling blood in the water and sensing money to be made, will often offer up select screenings in the merry old month of October. In fact, one AMC theater within an easy commute from my place is offering a slate of 31 classic horror films: a new one every single day. Will I rouse my ancient ass to see Creature from the Black Lagoon in 3-D? Stay tuned...This is how I was able to sally forth last Sunday and see Corpse Bride on the big screen. The movie looked great; I’m guessing the Fathom Event screening was some sort of cross promotion because the film was just re-released on disc in 4K. I remember always liking it, but not as much as I liked it at this most recent screening, which was both SOLD OUT and full of kids who loved it. A few of them dressed up; a few of them clutched Corpse Bride dolls.
THE PLOT IN BRIEF: Victor Van Dort is set to marry Victoria Everglot. It is an arranged marriage; the Van Dorts hope to rise in society because the Everglots are aristocrats, and the Everglots hope for an infusion of cash as they are impoverished. At the rehearsal, nervous Victor cannot say the vows correctly, so he goes for a walk to clear his head. He ends up in a forest, recites his vows correctly in practicing them, and accidently places the ring on a decomposing finger sticking out of the ground.
THIS IS ANIMATION.Emily, the Corpse Bride of the title, takes Victor to the netherworld where the unique problems of their “mixed marriage” become evident. How on earth can these two youngsters stay together? Will Emily ever be reunited with the original fiancé who murdered her? Will Victor and Victoria stay alive long enough to finally be wed? Is this really a film for children?
Corpse Bride is 77 minutes long, so it does not overstay its welcome. In fact, I sometimes wish it were a bit longer; the ending seems rushed and I long for one more musical number. How about a Corpse Bride Special Director’s Cut? The gaggle of kids I saw it with last Sunday loved it. It looked so great on that big screen: the colors popped. This is not an insignificant detail as one of the film’s more subtle jokes is that the netherworld is manifestly more colorful than “modern-day” grey London. I also love how Burton’s use of classic, old school character actors as voice talent makes the cast instantly identifiable: Christopher Lee, Michael Gough, Albert Finney, Richard E. Grant, and Tracy Ullman.SOMETHING I NEVER KNEW: This was LAIKA’s first film; four years before Coraline, they handled the painstaking animation work, utilizing complex dolls that used precision-crafted “clockwork” heads, adjusted by little hidden keys. These puppets used neither switchable heads nor switchable mouths. I know this now because the good people at Fathom Events programmed Blu-ray special feature “Making Puppets Tick” to pad out the runtime! Way to go, Fathom! About half of my audience stuck around to see it.I cannot overemphasize the puppet angle because I’m afraid that many young people today think every effect in every movie is achieved with computers. A few years ago, I was touring the Academy Museum with a very good friend. AMPAS’s animation exhibit featured puppets from Corpse Bride, which the friendly docent explained to my friend. Said friend expressed surprise. Corpse Bride was one of her favorite films. She expressed incredulity that the film wasn’t created inside an Apple computer somewhere. Museums are good.

Johnny Showtime: CORPSE BRIDE Oct 21, 2025
by JB
“We all end up the remains of the day...”
One of the many perks of Scary Movie Month is the chance to enjoy select horror films in honest-to-goodness movie theaters. Fathom Events, as well as individual theater chains such as AMC, smelling blood in the water and sensing money to be made, will often offer up select screenings in the merry old month of October. In fact, one AMC theater within an easy commute from my place is offering a slate of 31 classic horror films: a new one every single day. Will I rouse my ancient ass to see Creature from the Black Lagoon in 3-D? Stay tuned...This is how I was able to sally forth last Sunday and see Corpse Bride on the big screen. The movie looked great; I’m guessing the Fathom Event screening was some sort of cross promotion because the film was just re-released on disc in 4K. I remember always liking it, but not as much as I liked it at this most recent screening, which was both SOLD OUT and full of kids who loved it. A few of them dressed up; a few of them clutched Corpse Bride dolls.
THE PLOT IN BRIEF: Victor Van Dort is set to marry Victoria Everglot. It is an arranged marriage; the Van Dorts hope to rise in society because the Everglots are aristocrats, and the Everglots hope for an infusion of cash as they are impoverished. At the rehearsal, nervous Victor cannot say the vows correctly, so he goes for a walk to clear his head. He ends up in a forest, recites his vows correctly in practicing them, and accidently places the ring on a decomposing finger sticking out of the ground.
THIS IS ANIMATION.Emily, the Corpse Bride of the title, takes Victor to the netherworld where the unique problems of their “mixed marriage” become evident. How on earth can these two youngsters stay together? Will Emily ever be reunited with the original fiancé who murdered her? Will Victor and Victoria stay alive long enough to finally be wed? Is this really a film for children?
Corpse Bride is 77 minutes long, so it does not overstay its welcome. In fact, I sometimes wish it were a bit longer; the ending seems rushed and I long for one more musical number. How about a Corpse Bride Special Director’s Cut? The gaggle of kids I saw it with last Sunday loved it. It looked so great on that big screen: the colors popped. This is not an insignificant detail as one of the film’s more subtle jokes is that the netherworld is manifestly more colorful than “modern-day” grey London. I also love how Burton’s use of classic, old school character actors as voice talent makes the cast instantly identifiable: Christopher Lee, Michael Gough, Albert Finney, Richard E. Grant, and Tracy Ullman.SOMETHING I NEVER KNEW: This was LAIKA’s first film; four years before Coraline, they handled the painstaking animation work, utilizing complex dolls that used precision-crafted “clockwork” heads, adjusted by little hidden keys. These puppets used neither switchable heads nor switchable mouths. I know this now because the good people at Fathom Events programmed Blu-ray special feature “Making Puppets Tick” to pad out the runtime! Way to go, Fathom! About half of my audience stuck around to see it.I cannot overemphasize the puppet angle because I’m afraid that many young people today think every effect in every movie is achieved with computers. A few years ago, I was touring the Academy Museum with a very good friend. AMPAS’s animation exhibit featured puppets from Corpse Bride, which the friendly docent explained to my friend. Said friend expressed surprise. Corpse Bride was one of her favorite films. She expressed incredulity that the film wasn’t created inside an Apple computer somewhere. Museums are good.

2025 Scary Movie Challenge Day 21 Oct 21, 2025

2K Replay: HOUSE OF WAX (2005) Oct 20, 2025
by Adam Riske
Nominated for “Best Film” at the Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards. It lost to King Kong (2005).
• Best Scene/Moment (tie): Jon Abrahams trying to save wax Jared Padalecki and the finale with the melting House of Wax. It’s fantastic.
• Best Song: “Helena” by My Chemical Romance. This movie has a great soundtrack, btw.• Best Merch: A “2005 House of Wax…5x25 Mylar Movie Posters Lot of 8” for $49.99. I wish AMC used these. I don’t like how they no longer post what movie is playing in each auditorium. The mylars weren’t as cool as putting up the posters, but it’s better than nothing at all. These would be great to own because you could use the line “Want to get out of here and see my mylars?” when you meet someone at a bar. Then they’ll be all “Now playing in your bathroom…Van Helsing!” when they come over.
• Director Grade: House of Wax (2005) was directed by Jaume Collet-Serra.
Great Movies: N/A
Good Movies: House of Wax (2005), Orphan, Run All Night, The Shallows
OK Movies: N/A
Bad Movies: Non-Stop, The Commuter, Jungle Cruise
Unseen By Me: Goal II: Living the Dream, Unknown, Black Adam, Carry On, The Woman in the Yard
Overall Grade: B-
• Double It with This 2005 Movie: The Amityville Horror (2005)
• Year 2005 Movies to Trailer Before Them: Cry_Wolf, The Fog (2005), Venom• Never Talk to Strangers or House of Wax (2005)? House of Wax (2005)
• Mall Movie? It must be, right? It’s Dark Castle after all. The only thing holding me back is the 112-minute runtime. Mall movies are usually shorter.
• Only in 2005: A horror movie where Paris Hilton factored heavily into the marketing.
• Scene Stealer: Brian Van Holt.
• I Miss: The Dark Castle logo.
• I Don’t Miss: The Jon Abrahams character. I have nothing against the actor. It's just that he played the same type of d-bag in a lot of movies during the early 2000s.• 2005 Crush: Elisha Cuthbert.
• 2025 Crush: Elisha Cuthbert.
• What I Thought in 2005: I loved it! I thought House of Wax (2005) was by far the best of the Dark Castle movies with great special effects and a standout finale. I also dug the Chad Michael Murray performance, which starts one way and then develops into something more appealing as he tries to escape the wax town with his sister (also played well by Elisha Cuthbert).
• What I Think in 2025: I don’t love it like I used to but I’m still a fan. What I appreciate the most nowadays is that the remake stands apart from the original House of Wax (with Vincent Price) and takes a new direction. Both can be enjoyed together as a double feature like The Blob (1958 & 1988). House of Wax (2005) is more of a remake of Tourist Trap, which isn’t a bad thing at all because that movie also rules.

2K Replay: HOUSE OF WAX (2005) Oct 20, 2025
by Adam Riske
Nominated for “Best Film” at the Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards. It lost to King Kong (2005).
• Best Scene/Moment (tie): Jon Abrahams trying to save wax Jared Padalecki and the finale with the melting House of Wax. It’s fantastic.
• Best Song: “Helena” by My Chemical Romance. This movie has a great soundtrack, btw.• Best Merch: A “2005 House of Wax…5x25 Mylar Movie Posters Lot of 8” for $49.99. I wish AMC used these. I don’t like how they no longer post what movie is playing in each auditorium. The mylars weren’t as cool as putting up the posters, but it’s better than nothing at all. These would be great to own because you could use the line “Want to get out of here and see my mylars?” when you meet someone at a bar. Then they’ll be all “Now playing in your bathroom…Van Helsing!” when they come over.
• Director Grade: House of Wax (2005) was directed by Jaume Collet-Serra.
Great Movies: N/A
Good Movies: House of Wax (2005), Orphan, Run All Night, The Shallows
OK Movies: N/A
Bad Movies: Non-Stop, The Commuter, Jungle Cruise
Unseen By Me: Goal II: Living the Dream, Unknown, Black Adam, Carry On, The Woman in the Yard
Overall Grade: B-
• Double It with This 2005 Movie: The Amityville Horror (2005)
• Year 2005 Movies to Trailer Before Them: Cry_Wolf, The Fog (2005), Venom• Never Talk to Strangers or House of Wax (2005)? House of Wax (2005)
• Mall Movie? It must be, right? It’s Dark Castle after all. The only thing holding me back is the 112-minute runtime. Mall movies are usually shorter.
• Only in 2005: A horror movie where Paris Hilton factored heavily into the marketing.
• Scene Stealer: Brian Van Holt.
• I Miss: The Dark Castle logo.
• I Don’t Miss: The Jon Abrahams character. I have nothing against the actor. It's just that he played the same type of d-bag in a lot of movies during the early 2000s.• 2005 Crush: Elisha Cuthbert.
• 2025 Crush: Elisha Cuthbert.
• What I Thought in 2005: I loved it! I thought House of Wax (2005) was by far the best of the Dark Castle movies with great special effects and a standout finale. I also dug the Chad Michael Murray performance, which starts one way and then develops into something more appealing as he tries to escape the wax town with his sister (also played well by Elisha Cuthbert).
• What I Think in 2025: I don’t love it like I used to but I’m still a fan. What I appreciate the most nowadays is that the remake stands apart from the original House of Wax (with Vincent Price) and takes a new direction. Both can be enjoyed together as a double feature like The Blob (1958 & 1988). House of Wax (2005) is more of a remake of Tourist Trap, which isn’t a bad thing at all because that movie also rules.

2025 Scary Movie Challenge Day 20 Oct 20, 2025

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