Dipping another toe into the online stream, part two

The easy accessibility of streaming undeniably sucks me into watching movies I wouldn’t have bothered with if there’d been a price to pay, whether that would be for a theatre ticket or a Blu-ray. Which is why, despite disliking Warner Brothers’ kaiju franchise – a travesty of Toho’s legacy whose only bright spot is that the licensing fees help to finance Toho’s own authentic additions to the Godzilla universe; Shin Godzilla (2016) and Godzilla Minus One (2023) are two or the best kaiju movies ever made.

Nevertheless, I did watch Godzilla vs Kong (2021) and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024), both directed by Adam Wingard and completely missing the essence of what has sustained Godzilla through seventy years of changing popular taste. It’s hard to put a finger on the exact problem, but just compare these two with Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One, which situates the monster in a very specific cultural and historic context populated by realistic characters struggling with genuine dramatic problems; Wingard’s movies, in contrast, aim for a trivial Saturday matinee adventure style, which echoes the movies from the franchise’s weakest period – late-’60s and ’70s – when Toho was aiming at an audience of undemanding kids. Since at least Godzilla 2000 (1999), the studio has gone back further to recapture the more serious tone of Ishiro Honda’s original Gojira (1954).

That tradition is even more apparent in the black-and-white version of Godzilla Minus One. Like George Miller’s Black & Chrome Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), this doesn’t simply strip out the colour; Godzilla Minus Colour is a different film, using contrast and a rich palette of blacks, whites and grays to alter the tone of the narrative, emphasizing the bleak post-war context (in Fury Road, the effect heightens the mythical qualities of the narrative).

I wasn’t particularly interested in Michael Sarnoski’s A Quiet Place: Day One (2024) because the original A Quiet Place irritated me (and I didn’t see the sequel). This prequel has the quality of a direct-to-video knock-off, an unnecessary addition to a franchise which isn’t particularly worth pursuing. Why Sarnoski should’ve opted for this as his follow-up to the critically-acclaimed Pig (2021) is a puzzle, though he goes through the motions efficiently. As the title indicates, this covers the day the monsters arrive and follows various characters trying to get off Manhattan as they figure out the nature of the danger. The you-have-to-very-quiet gimmick is applied rather haphazardly, as it was in the first movie, but what ended up really irritating me was that Sarnoski’s script leans into the tired (and embarrassing) trope of the magic Black character who ultimately sacrifices herself to save a white character who has not shown himself to be worth the effort. Was he actually unaware that he was telling a white-lives-matter-more story?

Arkasha Stevenson’s The First Omen (2024) is yet another unnecessary prequel/origin story, this time depicting the source of the changeling foisted on Ambassador Thorn and his wife in the 1976 movie by a secret faction in the Catholic Church. A young American nun arrives in Rome to begin work in an orphanage, where she quickly discovers things are not what they seem. There are numerous call-backs to Richard Donner’s movie as her attempts to help a troubled girl trigger a series of deaths before she herself is demonically impregnated with Damien just in time for his birth to coincide with Mrs Thorn’s delivery.

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Streaming has opened up a broad space which both takes the place of, and alters, traditional home video. There’s still room for low-budget genre movies that might once have been released direct to video, but the bigger streaming services are also producing more expensive movies that would once have earned a theatrical release. My dip into the streaming pool has included movies in both categories.

Directed by alumni of Winnipeg’s Astron-6 collective, The Void (2016) is more straightforward horror than over-the-top comic pastiche like Manborg and Father’s Day (both 2011) and Psycho Goreman (2020). Something like a supernatural riff on John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), it has a disparate group of people seeking shelter in a rural hospital being besieged by members of a murderous cult; it turns out there’s a dimensional gateway in the basement through which Lovecraftian horrors are about to enter our world.

Chris Nash’s In a Violent Nature (2024) is more experimental. When a group of campers take a locket from an abandoned fire tower in the woods, they inadvertently waken a killer buried many years ago and held in place by the trinket. With a constantly tracking camera following the lumbering revenant, we’re taken on a trek through the woods as he tries to find what was taken from him, killing anyone he happens across. As has been pointed out, this is essentially Friday the 13th entirely from the point of view of Jason. We catch glimpses of other people, overhear snatches of conversation which gradually fill in the backstory, but mostly just watch the revenant walking with intermittent eruptions of graphic violence. This minimalist approach to a familiar horror trope works very effectively.

Irish filmmaker Damian McCarthy’s two features, Caveat (2020) and Oddity (2024), are both darkly atmospheric exercises in modern Gothic, their stories rooted in very specific, well-drawn settings, and he has a real skill with building towards well-earned scares. Narrative plausibility is not as effective, though, with each film being less satisfying than its individual parts. In the first a man takes a dubious job watching over a troubled woman in a house in the middle of a marsh, the true motives of his employer only becoming clear after a series of harrowing events. In the more recent film, a woman alone in a strange country house has psychic visions about the murder of her sister and is seemingly threatened by a crazed stranger who may or may not be the killer.

There are similar issues with another Irish horror movie, Corin Hardy’s The Hallow (2015), a folk horror tale in which a conservationist, his wife and infant son move to a house in an ancient wood and face hostility from the locals who don’t want the spirits disturbed. While a mysterious fungus offers an explanation for the mutated denizens of the woods, there are strong hints of fairies and changelings, all rendered with elaborate animatronics which give the movie a nice tactile quality, though the script is a bit thin and the characters barely sketched in.

Rodrigo Gudiño’s The Breach (2022) is yet another low-budget Canadian horror movie with vaguely Lovecraftian undertones. A badly mutilated body leads a small-town cop, his estranged girlfriend and her previous partner to a remote house in the Northern Ontario woods where a scientist has been conducting strange experiments – not unlike Dr Pretorius in Stuart Gordon’s From Beyond (1986) – with a machine which apparently opens a door to another dimension. Mutant creatures are unleashed (with some effective practical effects, though they’re used like off-the-shelf zombies); although there’s some atmosphere, the cliched relationship conflicts undercut the horror.

Closer to home, I watched Nicholas Verso’s Toys of Terror (2020) because it was shot in Winnipeg, designed by my friend Gord Wilding, and used stop-motion rather than CGI for its miniature monsters. I have to give the filmmakers credit for that decision, which is endearingly retro, but unfortunately the rest of the movie isn’t up to the standard of the effects, which are reminiscent of Stuart Gordon’s Dolls (1986) and the Puppet Master series (1989-2022 … so far). Once again, a broken family moves into a big old house only to reawaken an ancient menace – a chest full of possessed toys which lure away the kids and kill the adults.

I also finally caught up with another made-in-Winnipeg cable movie designed (and second-unit-directed) by Gord, Norma Bailey’s two-part Capture of the Green River Killer (2008), based on a case in the Pacific northwest in which a dogged detective spent two decades tracking a prolific serial killer (believed to have killed more than seventy women and teenage girls). As a local, I was quite impressed with how Winnipeg is used as a stand-in for Seattle, Tacoma and the surrounding country. The script largely follows the true-crime formula of the protagonist who becomes obsessed with the case to the point of damaging his own personal life. Two things stick out: writer-producer John Pielmeier’s decision to play the creepy “ordinary guy” killer himself, and his choice to tell the story through the eyes of one of the teenage victims, whom we don’t realize is actually dead until late in part two, essentially adding a ghost story layer on top of the procedural.

Also shot in Winnipeg, and featuring another damaged family, Assaf Bernstein’s Look Away (2018) is more interesting, and more successful. A mousy insecure teenager (India Eisley), bullied at school, finds a more assertive alter-ego pushing her from the other side of the bathroom mirror; having reached her emotional limits, she allows the other self to switch places with her and all her suppressed anger is unleashed on her tormentors. Horrified by what’s happening, she isn’t strong enough to reassert herself against her mirror image. The roots of her psychological conflict are embedded in the family, with her fearful and neurotic mother (Mira Sorvino) crushed by her domineering plastic surgeon father (Jason Isaacs), whose idea of a great birthday present is to restructure his daughter’s face to “give her confidence” (she was hoping for a car).

A teenage girl is at the centre of the much less resonant Becky (Jonathan Milott & Cary Murnion, 2020) and The Wrath of Becky (Matt Angel & Suzanne Foote, 2023), both of which have a pissed off girl (Lulu Wilson) going Rambo on Neo-Nazis who kill those closest to her. Neither movie makes much effort to rise above perfunctory set-ups as Becky uses Home Alone-style ingenuity to defeat rather ineffectual villains.

With streaming services financing genre movies, what might once have been small B-movies now get bigger budgets and a technical polish which may work against their essentially cheap thrills. Director Xavier Gens belies the Sharknado essence of Netflix’s Under Paris (2024) by playing its ridiculous concept straight – in fact, he sets up that concept with a genuine environmental concern as the opening sequence takes place beneath the great Pacific garbage island where sharks are apparently mutating in response to our pollution. Those sharks then pursue the scientist protagonist all the way to Paris, apparently adapting to fresh water just in time to breed in the sewers as the Olympics are about to begin. Naturally, in the Jaws tradition, politicians ignore the scientist’s warnings and the big fish chow down on swimming events in the Seine. With thousands of sharks beneath the city streets, it all becomes increasingly absurd but without the cheesy pleasures of a Sharknado.

AppleTV’s The Gorge (2025) is somewhat better, though its thin story and uninvolving emphasis on romance make it a bit of a slog at over two hours. I watched this just days after a friend made me aware of the successful new publishing phenomenon of romantasy – fantasy and sci-fi with a focus on romance – and I quickly realized that was what I was watching. What begins as a horror-thriller about a pair of crack snipers, one each from vague Eastern and Western blocs suggesting a lingering alternate-reality Cold War, becomes a tentative courtship between two lonely, damaged people.. Their task, each located in a tower on opposite sides of a deep gorge, is to prevent something unspecified from escaping. Forbidden to communicate with one another, boredom leads to contact and eventual romance, which is finally interrupted by an attack from below by what appear to be humanoid plants. Investigating, they discover that the gorge was the site of genetic experiments during World War Two and is now inhabited by, well, former soldiers whose genes have fused with tree DNA. The pair have been hired by a private corporation studying the situation in hopes of breeding, you guessed it, super soldiers. Realizing they’re not expected to live past their one-year tour, the romantic pair set about destroying the site and exposing the evil corporation. With a cast led by Miles Teller, Anya Taylor-Joy and Sigourney Weaver and some interesting creature designs, this might’ve been a fun 90-minute fantasy, but with half its running time padded with the couple’s romantic relationship there’s too much time to notice the narrative absurdities (not least, why would the – implied – Russians cooperate with an American corporation in the development of what would inevitably be an extra-national army of unkillable soldiers?).

Although not made specifically for streaming, Benjamin Brewer’s Arcadian (2024) might as well have been. This story of a father with two sons trying to survive in a depopulated world where monsters come out at night is ss thoroughly generic as it could possibly be. The kids are growing up and chafing at the limitations of existence on a remote farm, the more impetuous one taking risks which endanger the family. The influence of numerous prior movies undermines occasionally effective moments – this has all been seen before many times. As the dad, Nicolas Cage reins in his signature excesses to emphasize his sense of parental responsibility.

Speaking of Cage, after going to see Robert Eggers’s redundant remake of Nosferatu, I streamed Chris McKay’s Renfield (2023) hoping for a more entertaining version of Dracula. Cage is amusing as a petulant, overbearing Count who makes life hell for his titular minion (Nicholas Hoult, who plays Hutter in Nosferatu) and the boss-employee relationship is rich with possibilities which occasionally emerge through the rather tedious plot about crooked cops and drug dealers which takes over way too much of the running time. While Cage obviously enjoys playing his over-the-top character, the movie actually belongs to Hoult, who does a terrific impersonation of Hugh Grant (with whom he’d co-starred in the Weitz brothers’ About a Boy [2002]).

Other recent movies include Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ Heretic (2024), which stars Hugh Grant himself, who only seems to improve with age. Here he takes full advantage of the mannerisms and cloying charm which he honed in numerous rom-coms, turning them to sinister purpose with great effect. Visited by a pair of young Mormon missionaries who want to share their faith, he smothers them with solicitous charm which gradually reveals a very menacing undertone; he dissects the very idea a religious belief (his use of the board game Monopoly is brilliant), counter-proselytizing for nihilistic despair. The verbal and emotional cat-and-mouse eventually segues to a more conventional form of horror, but the writing is so sharp and the performances so good – Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East are a good match for Grant – that the film is one of the most satisfying horror-comedies to come along in quite a while.

I had hopes for Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs (2024), which begins with a deeply creepy prologue in which we first glimpse Nicholas Cage’s demonic title character, a seemingly supernatural monster capable of prompting people to commit horrific crimes. Here, Cage pushes the limits of even his capacity for weirdness, but the movie falters with an annoyingly weak protagonist, neophyte FBI agent Lee Harker, who shows none of the strength and determination of Maika Monroe’s Jay in David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2014). (I also watched Perkins’ The Blackcoat’s Daughter [2015] and Gretel and Hansel [2020], both of which had interesting touches but were ultimately unsatisfying; and also went to see his The Monkey [2025] in a theatre – one of those dire Stephen King adaptations which over-elaborates a simple story and never finds a clear narrative line, aggravated by tonal inconsistency – which suggests that even after making five features Perkins hasn’t mastered the basics of storytelling.)

I was ambivalent about Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024), despite all the critical praise. It’s a polished work with a good cast and some very disturbing body horror effects which escalate to extremes of absurdity over an exhausting 141-minute running time – but at heart, it’s superficial and obvious in its theme of pop culture’s brutal treatment of women as they age. Its intention to play as much as a comedy as a horror movie seems obvious in the implausible choice of a world-wide hit aerobics TV show as the venue for the sexist drama in which Elisabeth (Demi Moore) finds herself being shunted aside by corporate men who are always looking for someone younger and sexier; when she discovers an illicit drug, Elisabeth herself becomes that younger star (Margaret Qualley), splitting in two and entering a deadly struggle between her true self and the new self who replaces her and steals her fans. Fargeat obviously has an interest in deconstructing male-imposed definitions of women in movies, but there’s always a risk of reiterating the thing which is being criticized – less perhaps here than in her first feature, the extreme rape-revenge thriller bluntly titled Revenge (2017).

The Cairnes Brothers’ Late Night with the Devil (2023) has also been very well-received by critics … and again I was ambivalent. In this case, it seems to me that the writer-director brothers fudged the form they’d chosen – a variation on found-footage which is ostensibly a “lost” tape of a late ’70s television talk show, a format used well in Lesley Manning’s Ghostwatch (1992) and to a perhaps lesser degree in Chris LaMartina’s WNUF Halloween Special (2013). In these movies, tabloid-style TV shows supposedly investigate occult phenomena only to unleash some kind of real horror. In Late Night, ambitious host Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) wants to displace Johnny Carson in the ratings, but he’s more of a Jerry Springer type exploiting people in a sleazy way to create conflict between guests and studio audience. On Halloween night during sweeps week, he brings on someone who was supposedly possessed by the Devil – and unwittingly unleashes a demon in the studio. Although he tries hard, Dastmalchian can’t convince as a supposedly national celebrity and the movie constantly violates its “broadcast tape” conceit with a roaming camera which goes behind the scenes and picks up whispered private conversations.

In Henry Dunham’s modestly-scaled The Standoff at Sparrow Creek (2018) members of a Right-wing militia retreat to their secret armoury after a big fight between federal agents and another group like themselves. Suspicions are rampant, their political paranoia bleeding into distrust of one another as they try to figure out if there’s a cop embedded in the group. Tense and claustrophobic, the movie exposes the dead-end these enemies of society have pushed themselves into.

Although the Predator franchise has long seemed to have petered out in creative exhaustion, Dan Trachtenberg’s Prey (2022) does make an interesting attempt to breathe some fresh life into it. Set in Colonial America, it has a young Comanche girl, disdained by the young men of the tribe, gradually realizing that there’s something much more menacing in the woods than hostile white trappers and wild animals. When no one believes what she’s seen she has to take on the alien hunter virtually single-handed, proving herself more than a match for the high-tech weaponry the Predator brings to bear as it hunts trophies.

I don’t have a lot to say about Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Parts 1 & 2 (2021/2024). It’s been decades since I read the book, so I can’t gauge how faithful his adaptation is. My reference is, inevitably, David Lynch’s version, and in comparison I found Villeneuve’s two-parter visually dull and dramatically boring. Once again, Villeneuve saps the life out of an earlier, vibrant movie to make something thin yet bloated, as he did with Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

Just as I’ve never much liked Villeneuve (other than Arrival [2016]), I don’t have anything much positive to say about Eli Roth. However, I was surprised to find that Thanksgiving (2023) is an almost note-perfect simulacrum of an ’80s holiday slasher, whose chief flaw is that it runs about twenty minutes too long. But the look and tone are dead-on and only a couple of times does Roth slip fully into the nastiness of his previous work. It opens with a disastrous Black Friday riot at a big box store which perfectly sets up the string of murders a year later, and a cast led by Patrick Dempsey all hit the right tone.

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Finally, I’ve streamed a few animated movies, including a pair of Aardman claymation features. Will Becher and Richard Phelan’s Farmageddon (2019), another adventure for Shaun the Sheep, is more child-oriented than the more sophisticated Wallace and Gromit films, but is nonetheless packed with references to various sci-fi movies. The Shaun films are virtually dialogue-free, giving them a retro slapstick comedy ambience; here, the farmer’s plans to profit from a ramshackle UFO theme park in his field are complicated by a real alien who befriends the flock.

There’s plenty of action in Farmageddon, displaying Aardman’s ambitious use of stop-motion, but Nick Park and Martin Crossingham’s Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024) adds the elaborate verbal humour typical of the series and pushes the technical limits even further with numerous large-scale, frantic action scenes. As always, Wallace’s attempts to live better through technology go awry, leaving Gromit to sort things out. Here, the clueless inventor creates an unnervingly cheerful robot garden gnome controlled by a computer in the oversized cellar. In prison, Feathers McGraw, serving time for his crimes in The Wrong Trousers, hacks the computer, switches the master command from “helpful” to “evil”, and has the gnome replicate itself, creating an army of malevolent robots which help him escape from prison and once again go after the big jewel from the original film. This ends in a long third-act chase which begins on canal barges and moves on to speeding trains and a precariously high viaduct over a valley. Though executed frame-by-frame on large miniature sets, the action is as spectacular as anything in a Fast and Furious or Mission Impossible movie.

Guillermo del Toro also uses stop-motion for his first animated feature, Pinocchio (2022), not surprisingly a much darker version of Carlo Collodi’s fable than Disney’s. It begins during World War One with young Carlo, the son of woodworker Geppetto, being killed by a stray bomb which hits the village church. In drunken despair, Geppetto carves a boy from a tree growing by his son’s grave and a wood sprite brings the puppet to life. Precocious and unconstrained by social conditioning, Pinocchio violates the rules laid down by his father and embarks on an adventure through Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, a nation of cruel fathers and oppressed sons. Visually impressive, the film is curiously unengaging on an emotional level, reflecting what seems to be a trend in the filmmaker’s more recent movies – this, The Shape of Water (2017) and Nightmare Alley (2021) are all glittering surfaces with no real depth – following the disappointing path taken by Peter Jackson before him.

Jun’ichi Satô and Tomotaka Shibayama’s A Whisker Away (2020) uses traditional cel animation to tell its story of a socially awkward, grieving schoolgirl who causes problems with her public displays of a crush on a classmate. A large, suspiciously solicitous cat provides her with a mask which turns her into a cute kitten when she puts it on; she insinuates herself into the life of the boy, who thinks she’s a stray, and eventually opts to remain a cat to be near him. When her family’s house cat takes possession of her own human mask and replaces her, she realizes that she may have made a mistake and has to journey to Cat Island, a towering tree rising unseen above the town, searching for the mask seller so that she can regain her true self. Obviously influenced by Studio Ghibli, the film is full of visual details and evocative character animation rooted in the girl’s confused feelings.

Phil Tippett’s Mad God (2021) is a very different kettle of fish, a nightmarish piece of world-building which seems to refer only to itself (or Tippett’s own dark dreams). Tippett, a masterful animator who helped bring stop-motion into the big-budget mainstream with his work on movies like The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Dragonslayer (1981), RoboCop (1987) and Starship Troopers (1997) among many others, worked on this personal project on and off for three decades, a monument to personal obsession and the filmmaker’s ability to wrangle a huge team of student collaborators in service of that obsession. The film itself is virtually indescribable – it’s about design, textures and hand-crafted movement rather than narrative; a figure designated The Assassin descends into an underworld which resembles a devastated, bombed-out city of shattered buildings and indecipherable industrial ruins. What’s he searching for? Who knows? He encounters dangers; there’s a sinister Surgeon and his Nurse who are involved with a tentacled monster; there’s a Last Human (filmmaker Alex Cox as the only non-animated element). If there’s an actual story here, it’s so hermetically self-contained that I couldn’t penetrate it, but the sheer density of the visual creation makes it something like an endlessly fascinating art installation, so dense that it seems to insist on multiple viewings.