Tag: Until Dawn

2025 In Film: Day Three (The Too Flawed)

On By troubledproductionsIn Year round upLeave a comment

A Minecraft Movie
Ups: Fans of the franchise will love it.
The cast are fully into it.
Some good music.
Downs: No appeal to those who aren’t fans of the video game.
Jack Black and Jason Momoa probably should have swapped roles.
Even for a kids movie; far too dumb.
Best Performer: Jason Momoa.
Best Moment: The minecart escape.
Worst Moment: The title drop, it’s far too dumb.
Opening: Steve wants to mine but can’t as is a child, he comes back as an adult. Overly long, plus I feel it would have made more sense if he first arrived in the other dimension as a child, would have explained how he became so good at building.
Closing: Everybody wins and is happy. The song they play isn’t as good as they think it is.
Best Line:
Original review here

Black Phone 2
Ups: Great music.
Unique visual style.
Downs: Doesn’t really feel like a natural progression.
Completely unnecessary.
Best Performer: Ethan Hawke
Best Moment: Gwen calls out Finn and her dad. Is the only time it feels more than a horror movie.
Worst Moment: The opening
Opening: A young girl makes a phone call. Doesn’t really look like the rest of the film. Does come back later and tie into the narrative, which is a plus. But isn’t something that will hook people in. Plus, the central performance isn’t great.
Closing: The kids bodies are found and are used to help defeat the grabber. Very similar to the first movie.
Best Line: Oh, Finney. You of all people know that “dead” is just a word.
Original review here

Bring Her Back
Ups: Intense.
Terrifying at times.
Downs: Characters act very dumb at times.
Veers from holding the audiences hand to pushing them into a dark room.
Logically muddled.
Best Performer: Sally Hawkins
Best Moment: Oliver eating a knife. Disturbing as hell.
Worst Moment: The death of Andy. Doesn’t feel earned, doesn’t add to the narrative, feels a bit cheap.
Opening: Incredibly creepy cult footage. Sets the tone well. But leaves questions that the movie refuses to answer.
Closing: Laura carries Cathy’s corpse into the pool and cradles it as the police arrive. The best way it could have ended. I did fear it was going to end with her winning.
Best Line: I’m going to drown you, love.
Original review here

Die My Love
Ups: The two central performances are pretty damn good at times.
More films need to be made about postnatal depression.
Downs: Difficult to figure out what is real at times.
Bad background characters.
Seems like it doesn’t want you to like the characters
Best Performer: Jennifer Lawrence
Best Moment: The build up to the initial sex scene. You genuinely believe they love each other.
Worst Moment: The wedding, none of them come out of it looking good.
Opening: They move into a house, then have sex. Slow-paced.
Closing: They start a fire in the forest, which was alluded to earlier in the film.
Best Line: A thing you love is suffering.
Original review here

Five Nights At Freddy’s 2
Ups: Expands the universe.
The marionette.
The animatronics are great.
The central relationship is still incredibly sweet.
Downs: Feels too neutered.
In debt to much better films.
Best Performer: Piper Rubio
Best Moment: Mike monitoring the animatronics’ movements. Very much in keeping with the original game.
Worst Moment: Vanessa’s hallucinations/nightmare. Not very effectively done.
Opening: The death of Charlotte. Really well done.
Closing: Vanessa has been possessed.
Best Line: It’s so easy to become blinded by ambition even with the best of intentions, you don’t see the devil sitting right beside you.
Original review here

Happy Gilmore 2
Ups: Some nice callbacks.
Believable universe.
Weirdly breaks with tradition by talking about how important tradition is.
Pays lovely tributes to those who have passed
Downs: Repetitive.
Feels very low stakes.
Happy Gilmore is kind of an asshole.
Nepotism. So much.
Too many flashbacks to the first movie, almost as if it doesn’t trust you to remember them.
Best Performer: Bad Bunny
Best Moment: The traditional golfers training. Funny and chaotic.
Worst Moment: Happy’s drunken golf with strangers. It’s an incredibly funny scene, and I loved the other characters. But the fact it kept cutting before the cursewords was weird and felt badly done.
Opening: VERY quick “how we got here”. I’m amazed how effective it was. On the downside, Adam Sandlers narration feels like it was delivered during his lunch break. He then kills his wife, but that’s probably for the best considering how he writes love interests.
Closing: The good guys win, the bad guys not only lose but are humiliated. There’s no other way it could have ended.
Best Line: You look like Freddy Krueger worked at a Starbucks.
Original review here

Him
Ups: Violent.
Intense.
Disturbing
Downs: A tonal mess.
Wastes potential.
Best Performer: Tyriq Wathers
Best Moment: Cam (probably) paralyzing someone. Lets you know the commitment needed.
Worst Moment: The party, too visually messy.
Opening: Young Cam watches Isaiah win a game but severely injure himself. Isaiah then comes back from injury and keeps winning at the same level. Wouldn’t it have been more satisfying narratively if that injury effected his career?
Closing: Mass cult murder. Brutal, and fun, but kind of silly.
Best Line: Transitions of power are never peaceful.
Original review here

I Know What You Did Last Summer
Ups: Some nice callbacks to the original.
Quite funny at times.
Downs: Feels dated
Some people won’t appreciate what it does with legacy characters.
Unlikeable characters.
Some embarrassing callbacks.
Best Performer: Sarah Pidgeon
Best Moment: The death of Wyatt.
Worst Moment: The death of Tyler. Doesn’t play into the killers motivations, either of them. One killer wants revenge on her friends, of which Tyler wasn’t one. The other one is annoyed at the town for having forgotten the murders, Tyler was one of the few people talking about the murders.
Opening: An engagement party. The dialogue meant I automatically hated two of the characters, they were insufferable.
Closing: One of the killers is still alive. This is revealed in casual dialogue. Far too casual. “wearing jeans to your wedding” casual. Tone-deaf.
Best Line: Nostalgia is overrated
Original review here

Roofman
Ups: Sweet at times.
Believable romance.
Leighs characterisation is consistent.
Downs: Should have been a Christmas movie.
Feels too desperate to paint him as a nice guy.
Best Performer: Kirsten Dunst.
Best Moment: When we reveal that Leigh set him up. It would have been too unrealistic to not have her do that.
Worst Moment: The pawn shop break-in. Not followed up on
Opening: Jeffrey needs money to provide for his kid (who he soon forgets about) because otherwise she won’t love him. He decides to steal shit.
Closing: Text saying what happened next. He attempted to escape prison.
Best Line: We both know doing things the right way is not your superpower.
Original review here

The Twits
Ups: Does have some genuinely funny lines and moments.
Margo Martindale and Johnny Vegas are good leads.
Important message.
Accurate representation of modern politics.
Downs: Who’s it for?
Unfocused, going from one plot point to the next without them feeling connected. Feels very episodic.
Not the greatest animation.
Best Performer: Character actress Margo Martindale.
Best Moment: A family coming to an orphanage to refuse taking in an orphan out of fear they’re contagious. Truly crosses the line in a way few films dare to.
Worst Moment: The mayor farting. Even for a kids movie, it’s dumb.
Opening: The framing device; the story is being told by two flies in Mr. Twits beard. We see The Twits have built a theme park. Despite being seen as miserable, they sing a happy song.
Closing: The twits don’t die. Shame.
Best Line: “One of the worst liquid hot dog meat floods in the nations history”
Original review here

The Woman In The Yard
Ups: Makes daylight scary.
Sets up its different narrative pieces well.
Good performances.
Unique.
Feels very grounded
Downs: COMPLETELY falls apart in the final third. Like, drops off a cliff.
Best Performer: Peyton Jackson
Best Moment: The first time we see the woman, it feels MADE for posters.
Worst Moment: The attic moments.
Opening: Ramona watches a video of her deceased husband. It’s weird she filmed that moment, but it’s very sweet, and sets up SOOO much very quickly. Sets up what their relationship was like, sets up that they’re having problems fixing problems in the home, even the way she’s watching it sets up that he’s dead. Genius.
Closing: She decides not to commit suicide, the camera shows a painting signed by Ramona, but backwards. Possibly hinting that she DID in fact, commit suicide. Yay, “your children will be better off if you died” is a totally fine message.
Best Line: Today’s the day.
Original review here

Until Dawn
Ups: Some decent kills.
Bloody.
Decent effects
Downs: Switches between overexplanations and being annoyingly vague.
Survival feels more luck-based than as a reward for smart choices.
No reason to exist.
Best Performer: Ella Rubin
Best Moment: The death of one of the monsters.
Worst Moment: The bathroom scene. Don’t get me wrong, it was enjoyable, it was bloody, and it was entertaining. But it also demonstrated how luck-based the whole premise was. For a game based around “your decisions have consequences”, it’s annoying how the choices have no impact. “Don’t drink water or you’ll explode” is not a lesson.
Opening: One of the characters gets murdered, they’re clearly annoyed at this.
Closing: A car pulls up to a snowy cabin. A clear reference to the game, I assume. It’s shot in such a way that it’s obvious it’s SOMETHING, so I can only assume it’s that. Incredibly unsubtle.
Best Line: Is anyone else growing new teeth?
Original review here

Until Dawn (2025) Review

On By troubledproductionsIn ReviewLeave a comment

Quick Synopsis: Clover is on a road trip to find out what happened to her missing sister, she finds out. Her and her friends get trapped in a repetitive nightmare.

I’ve never played Until Dawn, but I have played some games by the same studio, which follow the same principles and guidelines. I genuinely love them, not just because I’m a fan of story-based games, but also because they’re interesting and have great accessibility options. A key part of those games is the notion that choices have consequences. Something as simple as “look at this poster” could be the difference between life and death. Importantly, you, as a player, have to live with the consequences of your actions. So it’s baffling that the main gimmick of the movie is that choices don’t matter because once you die, you reset into your original position.

Annoyingly, it doesn’t even do anything entertaining with that premise. When this has been done before, the characters die because of their mistakes, and learn from them to help them survive. Here, it feels like they’re being controlled to die, and there’s nothing they can do. For example, at one point, a character gets picked up by an invisible force and dragged into a building. What’s the lesson there? What can a character learn from that to avoid it? Similarly, there’s one set of deaths which is essentially “don’t drink tap water, you’ll explode”, which feels ridiculously unfair to the characters.

It feels like the movie itself gets bored of its own premise halfway through, with the characters waking up and realising they’ve died multiple times and can’t remember a lot of them (conveniently, the characters all forget the exact same ones). Why? How does this serve the plot? It seems like they only did that as an excuse to watch videos of previous deaths on someones phone, and cram in horror movie moments.

Which is another issue; this isn’t a story, it’s a series of moments from other horror movies that the filmmakers wanted to put in. It doesn’t settle on a tone or style that’s consistent throughout. It reminded me of Cabin In The Woods, but badly written.

The characters? They’re funny, I’ll give them that. But there are so many moments where they feel like movie characters instead of actual people. Some sentences uttered are only uttered by characters who are written; nobody responds as an actual human would respond. There’s also a weird sense of detachment. The characters quickly get used to the idea of dying and coming back, despite not knowing when their last life will be, so really, they could die at any point. There’s a moment when a character disappears, and I thought they were going to announce that she had died died, which would lead to everybody becoming less flippant with death, but nope, she’s just elsewhere. I’m not exaggerating when I say the characters treat death flippantly, at times they seem to welcome it. “fuck, stubbed my toe, guess I’ll die”. At one point, one of the characters flat-out murders one of her friends. That murder is never brought up again. If a friend drove a pickax into my stomach, I would find it hard to forgive them. Plus, can you imagine what it would be like if THAT life was the person’s final life? So their friend properly killed them and has to live with that knowledge, whilst also learning that their lives are finite.

Until Dawn is not completely terrible, though. The performances are fine, although it is hard to get past the feeling that they are discount versions of other actors; specifically, Rachel Weisz, Jenny Slate, Johnny Depp, and James McAvoy. It is weird how the film has objectively lesser-known actors than the game. The game had Remi Malek and Hayden Panettiere. Okay, this was before Bo Rhap, so Malek wasn’t a big name then, but it’s still strange.

Some of the kills are fun, and as much as I hated the explosion scene for what it did to the narrative, out of context, it was entertaining. There is a basis for a good idea here. But it needed more thought than it was given. I was really looking forward to this, and I can’t feel anything except disappointed.

Why we love…Silent Hill: Shattered Memories

On By troubledproductionsIn Why we loveLeave a comment

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Lets talk about Silent Hill (and by that I mean I talk, you read).
Not about Konami and their fucknutarry. But about the games we do have, the good and the bad.

konami
BURN KONAMI BURN!

As I mentioned in my Session 9 post, Silent Hill is deeply rooted in my childhood (okay teenhood), since I got the second game for Christmas when I was 13, then spend the rest of that day and days after playing it. I mean what else could get you out of the Christmas spirit better.

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But Silent Hill is special to a lot of people going back much further than me. At a time where horror games were more intone with creature features, or just puzzles with jump scares, your Resident Evils and Alone in the Darks- not to faults those series as they did they own part in progressing the genre, but Silent Hill came in with something more mature. Less violence, but more atmosphere and story building, where you don’t play as a gun toting bad ass, but as a normal guy.

recent evil silent hill

There were no end of the world conspiracy plots- well 1&3 kinda do- but were character driven and about real day to day fears that could actually happen, e.g. losing a loved one, marriages breaking up, guilt over the bad things you’ve done, ect. (Again I reference back to my Session 9 post). They became an alternative to people who didn’t want to kill the things that scare them, but think about why they do.

LabyrinthMaria

Now despite the series to this date having eight full installments, it’s as far back as 3 that people say the series lost it and has been in a never ending downward spiral it has yet to- and Konami has made sure it won’t- recover from. But I disagree.
My favorite Silent Hill games remain, Silent Hill 2 (which really doesn’t need any more talking about), Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (the subject of this post), and Silent Hill 4 (the cult one). But these choices come from a gamer that cares much more for story than gameplay. I’ll put up with the worst fucking mechanics if the story grips me.

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And that brings me to, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories; an odd duck in the series. A reimaging of the classic first game, that shockingly is actually a fucking reimagining and not just a remake for the money- like 90% of all horror movie remakes. It takes the classic story of Harry Mason searching for his daughter in the spooky town, blends it up and turns it into a snow cone; Shattered Memories: Silent Hill 1 on ice. Removing the silly occult plot but keeping the father daughter drama, it embraces the pure psychological stuff- a great move in my opinion. I don’t hate the occult laden stories of Silent Hill, but I’ve always found they make better back-stories for the town, than when they take centre stage.

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Beyond its well done recrafting of the story (which I won’t spoil) the game’s other best feature is its great use of the psychology, not always subtle, but great. This takes the form of Dr Kaufmann, here your passive aggressive psychiatrist. The story of SM is framed round a FPV of you answering questions with your therapist. An idea a lot of people will recognise from this year’s Until Dawn, but is far better executed and worked into the plot than there (though it does lack the awesome Peter Stormare chewing scenery by the fistful).

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I don’t think he was given any direction. He just kinda went with it.

As instead of just picking and choosing between stock fears that will inevitably show up, it actually does try to psychologically analyse you. Staying away from most yes or no, A or B questions , it gives you a lot of variety to personalise; like colour this family picture, who looks dead or sleeping, match the couples, ect. Now a lot of it is blatant; you talk about sex, the monsters and other characters are erotic. You like to drink, you end up in bars instead of diners (I know I’m using that as an example of blatancy, but I still find that so cool).

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There’s at least three versions of every major character. And even up to nine of Harry.

But for all the point A to point B outcomes, there are just as many subtle touches to affect how it plays. If you colour in the family quick and slapdash, then Harry is impatient and rude in the next scene, but if you take your time to be neat, then he’s calmer and nice. Or if you are honest about how much you drink, then what would be soda cans littered around, are beer cans. Small but affective.

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And from the writer who would go onto create Her Story, its no surprise such effort would go into such small details. It is those little touches, used to dive deeper into the characters and story, that has made SM such a lasting game for me, and anyone who has taken the time to play it (though really it’s like a 5 hour game if you don’t rush).

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It’s scary the first few times, suspenseful the next few, then just tedious the rest. But it’s more than worth it to uncover the story.

Now a common complaint of SM is that it just isn’t very scary and for a horror game that’s a big fault. And I won’t disagree, beyond some jump-scares and damn creepy moments and locations; it’s more oppressive than scary. But was it ever really trying to be? I mean there are definite moments of horror and suspense, mainly the very frustrating otherworld chase sequences, but as I said; Silent Hill deals with relatable fears, and SM does this more than any.

silent-hill-shattered-memories
I feel this poster really captures the true heart and feel of the game.

Not dealing with murder or child abuse, but with simple divorce. Love ripped apart and the effect it has on all involved, from parents to child. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is a horror by default, but drama by choice. And in a time where Gone Home, Life is Strange, and every Telltale game is so beloved, what’s wrong with that.