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Hanky Panky is a film with a 3rd act epic showdown is between a handkerchief and a hat. The film follows Sam, played by Jacob DeMonte-Finn, who has accidentally been invited to spend a weekend at a cabin. He soon gets to know these odd characters and is warned by his talking handkerchief that chaos will ensue and it does. As I watched the film, I could really feel the actors and crew having a lot of fun creating the film. It's always great to see filmmakers making their own paths by getting their friends together and creating something their own way. That is something that I am striving to do myself. I will have to say that I'm not sure if the humor always worked for me. At times it felt like only a select group would enjoy it. Besides that, all of the characters have really interesting and odd qualities to them that fill the movie quite well. Seth Green plays a minor role by voicing the evil hat. I grew up watching Robot Chicken and Can't Hardly Wait, so it was really cool that he was involved in the film. Lindsay Haun and Nick Roth's directing styles are a little subtle here to accommodate a more casual, improvisational film so it would be interesting to see what they could do with another material. Will this become a cult film? The audience will have to deem that. My theory on the sequel name is 2 Hanky 2 Panky.

From the opening logo I knew I was going to like this film and this belief was solidified after the very first scene. The drop zone sequence kept me on the edge of my seat, with the great visual style and the fantastic sound mixing. This feeling continued until close to the end, which felt like it had finally caught up to the small budget of film. The ending had a lot of the characters just getting thrown around and the set of the church felt very small. So compared to the beginning, the ending was very underwhelming but a part of me was still satisfied with the beats of it.

Jovan Adepo, who played the main character Boyce, did a pretty good job and I cared about his character. Wyatt Russell, who played Ford, played the cold-hearted soldier well but when it came to the end, where he had to put more emotion into his lines, is when his acting felt phoned in. I enjoyed John Magaro's Tibbet and his funny moments with the French boy. Pilou Asbæk's villainous Wanfer was like any other Nazi bad guy but his face prosthetics/cgi added more fright to the character.

Overall, I believe the film was well made with a full visual grasp of what the director, Julius Avery, wanted to do. This execution was far better than the disappointing Cloverfield Paradox, another Bad Robot film. I wish this was in the Cloverfield universe instead of Cloverfield Paradox but I still feel like this stands pretty well by itself.