The Ugly Stepsister (2025)

Score: 3 / 5

Elvira and her sister Alma arrive with their widowed mother, Rebekka, at their new home. Apparently lower class and approaching destitution, they are humbled and grateful to be accepted into the wealthier Otto's home, their new stepfather. Otto's daughter, Agnes, is beautiful whereas they are, well, comparatively ugly. Clearly, this story, written and directed by the Norwegian Emilie Blichfeldt in her feature debut, is a reimagining of the Cinderella tale from the perspective of Elvira. What becomes apparent, even early, is that this is also a bona fide horror film. The fantasy elements of the Disneyfied story are stripped here, to the point that this film feels more like a Grand Guignol production of the original Grimm material. 

Early on, Elvira pops a zit on her nose and we get to study the pus in extreme closeup. Eventually we'll see maggots and tapeworms and breaking teeth and needles near eyes and all sorts of violent, vicious horrors. Some of the tortures in the Saw franchise aren't as graphic as what we see here, and I had to excuse myself at one point to suppress a retch. I don't know quite how to express the visceral discomfort I had while watching this, except to say it was more harrowing an experience than Guadagnino's Suspiria or Roth's Hostel. That said, it's nice to see someone reimagine the source material in this way, really taking things to their creepy roots: grim if not wholly Grimm.

Unfortunately, that visual extremism isn't really my cuppa, so my favors will not go with this movie. Its points of interest were less than engrossing to me, though I admit some fascination on my part with the in-world obsession with physical beauty. It's more than a fad or a desperation to please the Prince and rise from squalor. There's a general hysteria around outer beauty, so much so that the extent to which Elvira will go to become beautiful is as laughable as it is horrifying. And it's all supported -- indeed, mobilized -- by her mother, who takes filial villainy to a whole new level. 

You can't help but get swept up in the wicked sense of glee evinced by director and actors alike. Lea Myren plays Elvira with so much gusto and verve that you can't help but be impressed. From under increasing layers of makeup and prosthetics, Myren maintains a dreamy, wide-eyed hope that her idolized Prince might actually love her when she's pretty enough. We might as well call this film The Passion of the Stepsister. After a brutal nose job and its Hannibal Lecter-esque mask she must wear after, her braces are brutally chipped off; she swallows a tapeworm to make her skinny, and now her tummy burbles ominously in an aural version of Chekhov's gun; false eyelashes are sewn onto her eyelids. Eventually her hair falls out and she's put in a garish wig. 

Yet for all its potential, the film never really manages to say anything about, well, anything. Except perhaps our ability to laugh at grotesque violence done to young women in the name of beauty. There's no real messaging about inner beauty, or found family, or sisterhood, or self-empowerment, or the ultimate cost of capitalistic beauty standards. Blichfeldt is either too angry for that or too enraptured with spectacle; her embracing of extreme awfulness here undermines and collapses the Grimm pretense of a cautionary tale. We don't even get much from Alma's perspective; why isn't she subject to these barbaric procedures? Is she immune from needing to marry well to support herself and their mother? What does she think, privately, of what's being done to Elvira? Alas, we get no such perspective. Blichfeldt instead keeps us on a loop, making a statement about desperation for beauty while butchering a young woman and then forcing us to relive this pattern several times without progression.

Strange Harvest (2025)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Stuart Ortiz makes his solo directorial debut with Strange Harvest, a mockumentary with some nasty fun surprises up its sleeves. Its sort of anti-X-files approach to crime features two detectives in the area around San Bernardino chasing down a serial killer known as Mr. Shiny. Well, chasing him down is a stretch; they're really cleaning up after him. For over a dozen years, Mr. Shiny has gotten away with horrific, vicious murders that haven't been linked despite somewhat ritualistic evidence at the crime scenes. Specifically, dismemberment and missing organs.

Taking as its hook our cultural obsession with macabre murder sprees in true crime procedural fashion, this low-budget affair smacks at times of authenticity. Not because it's so polished but precisely the opposite. Frankly, at times it feels like an amateur's work, or a film student's. Witnesses sometimes look like they've prepared their lines. The camera is propped at too conversational a level, with curious voids in the background instead of a wall or curtain. And this is all to the film's credit; much like in The Blair Witch Project, you can't help but get sucked in by the unpretentiousness of it all. This is going to be a gruesome little murdery story, so tuck yourself in and get cozy, yanno?

Which is when the film smartly takes a couple left turns. I was not prepared for the postmortem scenes, but they are shown in all their gory glory. This is clearly where the film's budget went: reminiscent of Saw or Se7en or the Hannibal series, we're forced into grisly scenes of torture and death with only the bloody residue to indicate how this atrocity happened. Oddly, there is one indication of a dead dog, which is censored, but the multiple murdered children are laid bare and plain for us to see. There's more than a whiff of Sinister here, and I had to avert my eyes at times. I was a little glad for this, because the film's general air often had me forgetting this was fictional, and not some true crime doc on a streaming service. In fact, I was most reminded of the nature of Strange Harvest -- it's a horror film, through and through -- in those nightmarish scenes when, via security cam footage or the like, we see Mr. Shiny in action. 

There's also more than a whiff of Lovecraft about the proceedings, and without spoiling too much, it's fair to say this is basically a Lovecraftian story. Mr. Shiny's suggested liaison with an eldritch evil gives the film its title, meant to account for a profane ritual involving human sacrifices. Whether or not you believe is up to you, in true fashion of the writer, but the film works regardless in its perverse sense of pop culture intertextuality. It belongs among the ranks of those I've already mentioned, of course, but also Lake Mungo, Resolution and The Endless, and Zodiac. There's a suggestion of The Exorcist, specifically when the suspect tours through Europe and the middle east. Ideas of the Manson killings and the Night Stalker swirled through my mind too. By the film's end, we still don't have all the answers we might want, but this film works by not giving us any more answers. 

Oh, and pay attention to the title song as the credits roll. It's a damn fine vibe.

Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025)

Score: 3 / 5

Another venture to Pandora leaves us elated at Cameron's mastery over visual splendor. While those hankering for more narrative meat to chew in this franchise will be left wanting, Fire and Ash, the third entry in this laughably expensive series mostly recycles the elements established in its watery predecessor. Between an ironically chilling new villain and a story slightly less plagiarized than the two first ones, this film hits similar beats while allowing Cameron's imagined world to breathe and maintain its pace. Some new elements are inspired, so it's not a totally dull retread, but one wishes for imagination to match spectacle here.

Shortly after the events of The Way of Water, Ishmael -- ope, pardon -- Jake Sully and his family are settling in to their new home among the Metkayina, Na'vi who live on oceanic reefs and have adapted to a mostly aquatic life. Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) are at odds, as the latter has developed an intense, murderous hatred of humans. As the threat of violent encroachment will likely never end, the family must decide what to do with Spider, a rather feral (and obnoxious) human boy who has been semi-adopted by the Na'vi family. Sending him away to live with other humans at the scientist encampment only works until their convoy is attacked by other Na'vi: a rival clan of violent heretics called the Mangkwan. 

Apparently having renounced the nature-god of Pandora, Eywa, the Mangkwan live a somewhat tortured life in no-man's land near an active volcano. Ash and charcoal are their color palettes, and they raid other Na'vi tribes aggressively. They are led by Varang (a hauntingly effective Oona Chaplin), a sort of loose cannon whose mystique is laced with sociopathy. Scattered by the attack, the Sully family struggles to handle a compounded threat when Varang begins to work with the humans in an effort to wipe out Pandora's resistance to colonization and industrialization. Conveniently, this leads almost immediately to Spider being "accepted" by Eywa, and infected with mycelium, so that he can now breathe freely on Pandora. 

Ugh, I know.

From this point, the film loops back into annoyingly familiar terrain -- narratively -- and squanders some promising opportunities hinted at then fully ignored. I like Fern Gully and Pocahontas as much as the next guy, and Moby-Dick as much as the next gay, but we don't need yet another grossly lengthy film dramatizing the same basic story with the same basic moves. Matt Reeves's Planet of the Apes series should have been cited as an inspiration for Cameron in this regard. Especially seeing that the screenplay was basically written by committee (five credited writers, no less), and produced and distributed by the entertainment-industrial complex that is Disney, it's shocking that there is so little attention paid to decent dialogue, pacing, and thematic conceit. The scenes with Spider and the other kids are the worst, still repeating bizarre colloquialisms ad nauseam in every single scene they tumble through. Yeah, bro, you know it, bro!

It doesn't help, I should note, that this film doesn't entirely feel like its own film. Rumor has it that this was intended to be a continuous story from the previous film, so I'd recommend a rewatch of that before this. Most of the characters aren't (re)introduced, so if you don't remember what Edie Falco and her team of weird humans (including Giovanni Ribisi and Jermaine Clement) are up to, you're shit out of luck this time. Additionally, there's the added complications of who is actually an avatar these days; Jake Sully is fully embodied, of course, and Kiri contains the spirit of Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver, who I love, but we can all agree that her voicing a child is weird, especially when she develops affections for her adoptive brother), and Quaritch (Stephen Lang) is still alive but also locked in an avatar body. I don't know, but I do think we've lost the plot a bit when it comes to the damn title.

Scenes with the whales (and their unbearable subtitles) are much worse in this film than the last, perhaps because the awe is gone. There's a montage late in this film of the whales in meetings that is so outrageously silly and dramatically inert that I almost completely checked out of the film. For something so profoundly cool to see on screen, the atrocious dialogue and frankly cartoonish sign language these CGI critters are forced to enact ruin the magic. I also think the editing is significantly poorer in this film than even in the last, though that's also partly due to the screenplay; we often go for extended stretches of time, even in battle sequences, only following a character or two. Granted, there are a lot of characters to keep track of here, but the editing (also apparently accomplished by committee: six credited editors!) seems hellbent on deliberately obfuscating. 

The elements with Varang and her tribe, however, are what I've wanted from this series since the first film. The Na'vi have such an interesting relationship with their god, their environment, and each other, and even back in 2009 we were given a glimpse of the shamanistic theocracy of their culture. The Mangkwan take this to its inverse extreme: they're presented as a Mansonesque cult of unhinged, gleeful violence. While I remain annoyed that Quaritch takes the spotlight in this film, making Varang a sort of minion not long after she's introduced, even her presence helps the film feel more interesting than it should. And it's a shame, because Cameron has introduced us to very strong female characters -- heroes and villains -- before in his career, and nobody can say Saldana's performance in the previous two films isn't one of the best parts of this franchise. 

Just like nobody can fault these films for sheer awesome spectacle. Frankly, I'd love to watch these films just as they are but without dialogue. Sure, we'd still see the repeated climactic battle and the follies of the invading humans, who never fail to underestimate the whales' destructive capabilities. We'd still see repeated raids and captures of children and those pinkish tentacles in their hair having sex with other creatures. We'd still get the rousing music and immersive sound effects, but at least we could come up with our own damn dialogue. 

I don't like just shitting on a movie -- and truth be told, this was a very fun time at the cinema -- so I'll add my own spin here. This movie could have been so much better had we focused wholly on Varang. Perhaps including a story about Jake or even Neytiri trying to find their way forward and getting seduced into this cult, even as the supposedly salvific Spider continues on his way to the humans (which could then lead into the inevitable fourth film). We could have even started with the humans, including the terrifying scene where she decides her people need guns for maximal killing prowess.