This Film is Not Yet Watchable – October 2023

The beginning of October marks the official start of “Spooky Season,” where we all celebrate the things that give us just the right kinds of scares. It’s also the start of “Knockoff Month,” where we all roll our eyes and laugh at the cheap imitations of things that are supposed to be worthwhile. Yes, whether it’s a lame ripoff costume, a few rolls of toilet paper unspooled over your neighbor’s house, or a movie that pretends to be something more than just the same recycled trash (and probably written on the aforementioned TP), there’s no shortage of almost comically awful excuses for entertainment this month, and that’s before we even get to the goddamn pumpkin spice abominations.

We’re fully into Awards Season now, with the prestige festivals kicking off across the country and around the world, and as such, there are basically two types of bad movies we get this month. On the one hand, you have shitty horror movies. On the other, you have shitty hardware bait. There are always a few pieces of garbage that don’t conform to either column, but just as often there are films that are essentially both. In all cases, though, the basic sin is still the same, acting like something is unique when it’s really all too formulaic. And after I just went through this very exercise in futility when it came to The Creator, you can certainly see why I’m not the least bit excited to do it again.

Still, this month’s lineup brings me a small degree of hope. With the year-end studio pushes beginning in earnest, we’re very likely getting to the point where the remainder of 2023’s output will be largely positive. For this month’s tally, there are 13 films that get a pass to 11 that don’t. That seems like a large amount of crap, and it is, but bearing in mind the previously mentioned caveats, it’s not so bad. Terrible horror movies are a dime a dozen. It just so happens that a bunch of them get released this time of year, for obvious reasons. Next month they’ll all be pretty much gone, leaving only some weak franchise fare and disappointing contenders for the most part. Even with the large number of pre-failures this month, there’s not all that much that’s truly horrendous. Even this month’s “winner” of the title of “The Worst Trailer in the World” was more about finding the one subpar entry that would yield the most jokes. It still looks bad, but I’ve seen far worse. Maybe I’m losing my edge a bit. I don’t know.

With that in mind, I very much have a job to do, one I relish like the bile that flows in my veins. Strap yourselves in, squeeze into your best Adolescent Karate Reptile costume, and send me ALL THE TWIX! This is the October 2023 edition of “This Film is Not Yet Watchable!”

Foe – October 6

Part of the reason this month’s crop feels a little bit off for me is because admittedly, I’m quite tired at the moment. I’m working hard on my current gig, I’m watching as many movies as possible on my days off, I’m parsing screeners from film festivals, and I’m tracking down Animated and International Feature submissions from all over. Add to that the fact that Thursday is my late mother’s birthday (my sister’s coming out tomorrow to celebrate/commiserate), plus the fact that I have to hustle for my next gig as the current one ends in a couple of weeks, and I am too pooped to poop sometimes.

This translates somewhat to the movies and trailers I’m viewing, and over the last few months, one subgenre in particular has left me exhausted. You guys, I’m done with robots. I just can’t take anymore, at least not for a while. The last six months have been dominated by discourse surrounding artificial intelligence and how the wealthy and powerful essentially want to replace us in personal and professional settings with machinery. It led to two historic Hollywood strikes (one of which is still ongoing), and it’s an ever-present concern for several other industries. And while I’m sure the artistic intent for some of these projects is sound and positive, I’m just burnt out on the subject because the studios keep ramming it down our collective throats.

Foe has two major strikes against it right from the off for me. One, it’s robots. Two, it’s yet another “Based on the Best-Selling Novel” adaptation. Getting on the Best-Sellers list doesn’t mean anything anymore. It did in the pre-internet age, where you had to read printed books that you physically bought from stores or borrowed from libraries. Now basically anyone can claim the title so long as they put one out, thanks to the myriad classifications on Amazon that someone can qualify for. And just like being #1 on the Billboard chart, all it means is that people paid money for something, not that it has any inherent value or quality. So can we please stop pretending it’s an enticement?

I love Saoirse Ronan. Paul Mescal won me over last year. I don’t give a shit about Lion, which was a good idea that should have been a short, and it’s the exact type of movie that gets artificially inflated by awards circuit buzz rather than actual merit. But more than anything else, any kind of “examination” of a relationship that includes the idea of sending a husband to space and leaving his wife behind with a robot replacement is monumentally stupid, and not worth the two seconds your brain would take to dismiss it. This is bullshit through and through, and thankfully, I’m not the only one who thinks so. In advance of its release this week the score on Rotten Tomatoes is a dreadful 19%. I’ll at least give MGM a modicum of credit for showing the film to critics in advance like they’re supposed to, but that doesn’t save the product.

And seriously, no more robots for a while. Please.

Pet Sematary: Bloodlines – October 6

Hey, you know what sucked? Pet Sematary. It had a couple of decent moments, mostly courtesy of Denise Crosby, but for the most part, it sucked. You know what else sucked? Pet Sematary Two. You know what else sucked also? The Pet Sematary remake from 2019! That one somehow has the highest RT score of the bunch, at 56%. So clearly a prequel was necessary, right? Yeah, it’s at 21% right now.

The original was by no means great, but it at least had a solid premise for scares, a couple of good performances, and some effects that worked for the time. Everything since then has felt like a bad student film masquerading as true horror, and this is no different. I mean, look at the dog in the first scene. Is that supposed to be scary? Or intimidating? Or ominous? Or anything other than a ball of cuddles? Because he’s not. He’s just a snuggly little buddy who needs a bath to be extra snuggly. I feel nothing otherwise.

Also, as I say to so many great actors in this space, David Duchovny, YOU ARE BETTER THAN THIS!

Desperation Road – October 6

“Life’s a whirlwind, and we’re all caught up in it.” That empty tautology comes courtesy of Mel Gibson in Redemption Road, a paint-by-numbers thriller that delights in its endless string of genre tropes, gun fetishization, and savior complexes. It’s a natural fit for Gibson, honestly, and based on the clips, he appears to be the best actor in the cast by leaps and bounds. But that’s not a lot to go on.

This is the kind of mindless drivel that the QAnon idiots who salivate over Sound of Freedom think makes for high art. Ooh, isn’t it so deep and ironic that a cop tried to rape a girl and an ex-con will save her? This totally means that the Justice Department is corrupt or something! No, it’s not. It’s lazy writing, just like having the one good cop be black just to pretend you’re not a full-on racist making redneck porn. There’s a reason that the film’s tagline is, “The road to redemption is twisted.” That’s because this is meant to be more career rehabilitation for Gibson than anything else, casting him as a caring parent who does what’s right regardless of who’s wearing a uniform. Literally nothing else matters in this preview. I’m sure there are people who’ll think this means he’s back. The rest of us will just watch Hacksaw Ridge again.

Cat Person – October 6

There’s a ton of content coming out this first week of October, so naturally a good chunk of this month’s entries are front-loaded. Thankfully, this is the last of the bunch for the opening weekend, because things were starting to get depressing. Speaking of depressing, here’s Emilia Jones in Cat Person. You might remember her as the young woman who charmed the entire country with her gorgeous rendition of “Both Sides Now” as the culmination of CODA and its ascent to Best Picture a couple years ago.

Well, now she’s in a second-rate clone of Promising Young Woman. No seriously, almost all the plot beats are there in the trailer alone, including on-screen text that reads, “Men are afraid of what women will say. Women are afraid of what men might do,” which is only barely legally distinct from that earlier film’s exchange of “It’s every man’s worst nightmare, getting accused of something like that./Can you guess what every woman’s worst nightmare is?”

It goes from there. The only major difference in plot is that rather than start with rape, this movie decides to start with the airtight presumption that those who are unlucky in love are just losers (Nicholas Braun’s Robert is openly mocked for being older, a bad kisser, and apparently inadequate in bed) who deserve their solitude, and when they get upset about it, they turn into rapists, thus retroactively justifying the shunning because a plot twist will reveal they always were predatory. This then leads to a “comedic” plot straight out of “Goodbye Earl” where Jones plans Braun’s murder. High-larious.

Seriously, can we stop with the broad strokes and the presumption of guilt? This couldn’t just be a story about a hookup that didn’t work out, or any number of dumb decisions people make. This couldn’t be about having a little empathy and giving someone a chance to improve. Nope, he’s a loser, and a stalker, and a rapist, and he has to die, because subtlety and nuance is for incels or something. How dare an average guy ask out a beautiful girl? It can only be for assault-y purposes! And for the record, having cats doesn’t make you “seem non-threatening.” Having cats just makes you not allergic to cats. The fuck outta here!

Dark Harvest – October 11

Sometimes you feel sorry for a production that got lost in the COVID shuffle. Sometimes you have Dark Harvest. This film was supposed to be released in 2021, but got pulled from the schedule due to the lingering effects of the pandemic. It got pulled again last year. Now it’s getting a one-day only release next Wednesday at Alamo Drafthouse locations before going straight to digital.

It’s not hard to see why. Along the same lines as Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, this is just a tossed-off, no budget B-movie that feels like it skimmed the Cliffs Notes of Children of the Corn and Jeepers Creepers and stretched it to feature length. If you’re into that, you might have a good time. But this has no business being on a big screen, and you can tell from watching the footage in the trailer.

Dear David – October 13

You know it’s been a terrible year for horror films when there’s an actual Friday the 13th in October, and this is the best we can come up with. There are only three major releases the entire weekend: this, an unrated sci-fi film with Scott Bakula and Bella Thorne, and the scariest thing of all – the Taylor Swift concert movie.

FAIL!

We only get Friday, October 13 every five-to-seven years, and Hollywood preemptively conceded the entire weekend to the same vortex of celebrity suck that has now consumed the NFL because her latest future terrible song source might be the tight end for the Chiefs? Seriously? Because let’s get this out of the way right now. Dear David is about the only possible thing more shallow than Taydolf Swiftler herself. It’s a movie based on a Buzzfeed writer’s made up Twitter thread.

Yeah, you read that right. In 2017, Buzzfeed writer Adam Ellis wrote a bunch of bullshit on his Twitter feed about seeing a ghost. How do I know it’s bullshit? BECAUSE GHOSTS AREN’T FUCKING REAL! Still, the thread went viral and gained him a million followers (which assuming they’re not all bots equates to a whopping 0.00012% of the world’s population), so clearly there was a mandate for this, and naturally Buzzfeed decided they just had to adapt it.

And watching the trailer, you can clearly see that this is a clickbait listicle disguised as a movie. The writer gets into flame wars with trolls, every horror movie cliché plays out in succession, jump scares abound, and all of it is embossed with Buzzfeed branding. I can already see the headline for the review: “17 Times Corporations Used Movies for Thinly-Veiled Marketing. Number 13 Will Surprise You!”

To quote the webspeak employed by this nonsense, DIAF.

Butcher’s Crossing – October 20

Nic Cage, buddy, I love you, but take a break for a while. This is the sixth of seven movies releasing this year for the man, and I’m exhausted just trying to keep up. It also doesn’t help that this just looks like a generic western with nothing to really add to the conversation. I will agree with one of the pull quote reviews (from its premiere at last year’s Toronto Film Festival) that it does look to be beautifully shot, but that’s really all I can see going for it at the moment.

The idea of some Harvard kid going out west for a hunt feels like clumsy class warfare commentary. The framing device of overhunting buffalo for pelts plays like a bad run at The Oregon Trail. Whatever’s going to pass for sexuality looks decidedly uninteresting. Nic Cage bald resembles what I imagine a remake of Face/Off would entail with John Travolta right now. The Stomp-esque “beat” made in the edit out of the sound effects for packing rifle rounds and sharpening knives is just stupid. It doesn’t build tension, just impatience.

This is what we call oversaturation of the market. Last year with The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Cage played up his zanier aspects, and I remember chuckling when I read an interview with the writers where they said they wrote the whole thing on spec, never imagining that Nic would say yes. After this year’s insane output, it’s clear that would have never been an issue, because the man will take on just about anything. I admire him for this, but goddamn dude, let us process the last flick before you bombard us with another!

The Other Zoey – October 20

Remember what I said earlier about this month’s “Worst Trailer” just being the one I could get the most jokes from? This is why. Between Dear David and The Other Zoey, there were clearly better options for incredibly bad looking trailers, but they didn’t have enough substance to elicit many decent gags.

You want to know how dumb this is? I almost had to take the trailer from Amazon’s UK and Australia page, as they have the international distribution rights (which makes sense since Prime is quickly becoming the go-to source for gag-inducing rom-coms), because Brainstorm Media, the domestic distributor, didn’t bother posting the trailer on YouTube until just a few days ago. Never mind the fake posturing on caring about intelligence, the fact that a girl who thinks she’s too good for a meathead will inevitably fall in love with him anyway (and his cousin, because how will her heart choose?), that the whole plot hinges on the statistical near-impossibility of someone knowing two different girls named Zoey, or that the entire relationship will be based on a lie taking advantage of someone’s injury and disability, that fact alone shows just how stupid this whole endeavor is.

This triggers me a bit, because one of the biggest frustrations I have in the dating world is seeing women on various sites who describe themselves as “sapiosexual,” meaning they’re attracted to intellect. This movie tries to demonstrate that by having Zoey (Josephine Langford from the nauseating After series, so you know she’s credible when it comes to loving substance over looks) and cousin Miles (Archie Renaux of the very ill-advised Voyagers) both guessing the incredibly easy crossword answer of “isthmus.” After nearly a decade on several apps, I have had exactly zero matches or conversations with anyone who describes themselves as such, and this movie shows why. A lot of these women are just as shallow as the rest of us. They like to think they’re high-minded, but when it’s all said and done they still want Channing Tatum. They just really hope he can read. And if you think what I said was mean, unfair, or even worse, sexist, just go watch Cat Person and delude yourself into thinking I’m just an incel loser and potential predator who deserves to be alone. You wouldn’t be the first.

Oh, and just because you comment on rom-com tropes and how you’re keeping things PG-13 doesn’t excuse you from engaging in such formulaic behavior. Do better!

Five Nights at Freddy’s – October 27

I’m not saying it won’t be good. I’m saying that I see red flags. Also, after the successes of the Sonic films, Detective Pikachu, and The Super Mario Bros. Movie, I think studios are getting a bit cocky when it comes to video game adaptations, and the streak has to end eventually. Some might say that Gran Turismo already represents that break, and I can’t really argue too much against that idea (mixed reviews and $114 million gross against a $60 million budget would represent a marginal victory from where I sit, but I understand if others don’t see it that way), but Five Nights at Freddy’s seems much more poised for either a critical or commercial flop.

The games are fun as hell, a series of point-and-click survival horror indie titles that prove you can make just about anything scary – even Charles Entertainment Cheese – if you do it right. I’m not even a fan of horror games, but this series is a blast. And for what it’s worth, the scenes shown in the trailer do a good job of following the lore, and the realization of the animatronic killers is well done.

What gives me pause boils down to two elements. One, I don’t think Josh Hutcherson is right for the role of Mike Schmidt. I still see Peeta. That may not be fair, but it’s honestly how I feel. Of all the actors from the Hunger Games films, he’s the one I’ve least been able to see in other contexts as his own actor. I’m not saying he’s incapable, just that it’ll be harder to win me over than literally anyone else, especially since the character is a father bringing his small daughter to the restaurant. Hutcherson’s only 30, which is certainly old enough to be a parent, but I would have been more comfortable with someone who didn’t look so young. It just feels a bit out of place, but I hope I’m wrong.

The second is that the film feels pretty linear and standardly paced like any other franchise horror movie. It’s not that it can’t work, but part of the charm of the games (especially the original trilogy) is the paranoia of the ticking clock and the limited resources. You had to immerse yourself in the experience because your actions, and the timeliness of them, could lead to your salvation or slaughter. This just looks like a regular scary movie set in the world of the game, which might be fine, but I get the sense that the interactivity won’t translate properly.

I’ll probably still give this a go, but my misgivings are hereby registered. If I’m wrong, awesome. If I’m right, well, it’s not like the signs weren’t there.

Fingernails – October 27

I feel like I’m talking in circles. Seriously, what did I just fucking say about being tired of robots and AI? We started off with the absurd premise of a robot replacing a husband in space, and now we have AI calculating romantic compatibility through DNA samples? Seriously, did the machines write every script that got greenlit this year?

What’s more, you’re potentially wasting some of my favorite actors in what comes off as a pretentious, computer-based take on The Lobster. Riz Ahmed, Luke Wilson, my future wife Jessie Buckley, they all seem to just be going through the motions, as if their humanity has been preemptively stripped for thematic purposes. At least with The Lobster, there was a point to it, a biting farce about how we’ll contort ourselves just to be seen as superficially “normal.” Here it just feels like someone saw Buckley humming a catchy tune and decided to wrap an entire production around it. This is what I mean when I talk about films that subsist purely on festival and Awards Season buzz rather than focusing on telling a good story.

Also, if you’re poly, sorry, the algorithm says your love is wrong. I’d say “fuck the machines,” but at this rate we’re basically taking it literally.

***

With that, we reach the bottom of the proverbial barrel, “The Worst Trailer in the World… This Month!” As previously stated, in terms of pure filmmaking, acting, and storytelling quality, this really isn’t the worst that October has to offer. But of the set, it’s the only one that I could say something of parodic or legitimate substance about. This still seems pretty dumb, but not intolerably so.

Freelance – October 27

If this movie had a baby with Cat Person, it would be called Die, Uggos, Only We Get to Be Happy and Fuck!

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Finally, as always, it’s time to end on a hopeful note with this month’s “Redemption Reel.” For this go-round, the most promising entry comes from something of an unlikely source, delighting in the spirit of the season without succumbing to their own worst practices.

Totally Killer – October 6

Blumhouse is very much NOT one of my favorite studios. Its entire output has consisted of the brilliant Get Out, BlacKkKlansman, and Whiplash, the campy Happy Death Day films, and basically every major piece of lazy, jump scare-riddled, horror crapped out over the last decade-plus, including the ungodly awful Insidious, Purge, and Paranormal Activity franchises. They think they’re the vanguard of the genre, when in reality their logo is an advance notice that a movie’s going to be shit more often than not.

So imagine my surprise when I saw their name on the trailer for Totally Killer. This genuinely looks like a good bit of fun, in the same vein as HDD and the Fear Street trilogy. It’s silly, self-aware, and doesn’t appear to be shying away from righteous kills to mix in with the humor. A lot of this is probably down to Nahnatchka Khan directing. She’s a seasoned TV writer, famous for her work on American Dad! and Fresh off the Boat (which is probably why Randall Park is in this), and she also directed one of the few truly great rom-coms of the past decade, Always Be My Maybe. She knows how to blend formats to keep things both grounded and hilarious, and I can’t wait to see what she does with an 80s-style slasher set in the 80s through time travel. Almost certainly, the big horror hit of this weekend (and this month) will be The Exorcist: Believer, for obvious reasons. But when it comes to interesting takes on the scares, this is the one that piques my curiosity the most.

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That’s all I’ve got for this month. Have a great October, enjoy some foliage, and again, SEND TWIX!

Join the conversation in the comments below! Do you plan to see any of these films? Was I too hard on any of them? When will society do the right thing and cull all of us non-10s so that people of value don’t have to look at us anymore? Let me know! And remember, you can follow me on Twitter (fuck “X”) and YouTube for even more content!