nydjames

Clown in a Cornfield (2025) is garbage. Sure, it's well directed-but it's well directed garbage. It's like they brought in a professional filmmaker to shoot a high school play starring only the jocks and cheerleaders. The acting is stiff, the dialogue is cringey, and the characters are so thin you forget their names before they die. The kills are lazy, the tension never builds, and the whole thing feels like a stitched-together checklist of slasher clichés. It wants to be a throwback, but brings nothing new and doesn't even do the old stuff well. It's all style, no soul, and not a shred of wit or originality. I gave it a 3/10. If you value your time, skip it.

Sally Hawkins delivers a fearless, gut-wrenching performance in Bring Her Back, a horror film that's equal parts emotional devastation and grotesque body horror. The acting is superb across the board, the atmosphere is suffocating in the best way, and the direction keeps you guessing-right up to the moment you realize you're not sure what the hell just happened.

At its core, the story is about grief, obsession, and a mother's willingness to cross literal demonic lines to reclaim her lost daughter. And while I admired the ambition and symbolism, I'll admit: the mechanics of the occult ritual got a little murky. There's possession, corpse-munching, soul vomit, and a drowning-but the how and why of it all isn't laid out clearly. I had to mentally diagram it afterward like it was a scene from Alien crossed with Hereditary.

Still, this thing looks gorgeous. The sound design is unsettling, the pacing works, and despite a few "wait, what just happened?" moments, it never lost my attention. If you've got a strong stomach and appreciate elevated horror with actual emotional stakes, it's absolutely worth a watch.

One warning: there's some intense body horror-less boo, more bleugh. If that's not your jam, consider yourself warned.

Bottom line: creepy, classy, and a little confusing. But damn, it sticks with you.

Until Dawn isn't a movie - it's a chaotic montage of disconnected nonsense stitched together with the world's loosest thread of logic. It plays like an AI-generated horror script where every character says, "Let's do the dumbest possible thing next," and then the director says, "Perfect, print it."

There is no suspense, no cohesion, and worst of all - no intelligence. Every single character behaves like they've never seen a horror movie in their life. It's one boneheaded decision after another. I can forgive a bad monster or a weak twist, but I cannot forgive lazy writing that assumes the audience is as stupid as the characters.

Compare this to something like Barbarian, where the heroine actually thinks, adapts, and reacts like a real human being. In Until Dawn, it's just: walk into danger, scream, repeat. No stakes. No strategy. Just a highlight reel of horror tropes with none of the tension or payoff.

Save your time. Watch literally anything else - or just stare at a blank wall. It'll respect your intelligence more than this poop.