Ma (2019)

A really entertaining thriller with an amazing central performance from Octavia Spencer, that stumbles a little when it gets into the third act - people don't call police when they should, and the operatic finale ends much sooner and easier than it should.

Rating: interesting and fun, if a little rough.

Cocaine Bear (2023)

Apparently this was inspired by seeing a tweet about the actual cocaine bear, and I'm not surprised - it feels like a first draft tossed out over a weekend that never progresses past its 140-character equivalent. You never care about any of the characters, partly because the dialogue is so bad and partly because hardly any of them act consistently or logically (neither does the bear, even for a cocaine bear). It never builds up any steam either, it just jumps between various random set-ups. It has some practical gore in it but a bunch of CG gore too and there's always a CG bear involved, plus it's often executed very cartoonishly, so the whole thing ends up feeling more like Shanghai Soccer or Man Vs Bee than, say, Tremors to pick even a mild example. All you really need to know about it is that they chose White Lines and Just Can't Get Enough for needle drops. It's one of those fake, sanitised 'b-movies' that thinks having a catchy title is enough.

Rating: Weak.

She Said (2022)

The dialogue is often stiff, presumably due to legal requirements that it be taken directly from statements etc, and there's not much of a dramatic structure, presumably due to a choice to be as accurate as possible to the real life events. But despite all that, it's a fairly engaging piece full of good performances.

Rating: Quite good.

A Knock At The Cabin (2023)

SPOILERS BELOW

This is a decently assembled collection of tropes (cabin in the woods, home invasion by kooks, someone says apocalypse is imminent so hard decisions must be made and may or may not be right), and not much more. The performances are solid, though the more naturalistic performances clash with Shyamalan's dialogue, which works best when delivered in quiet deliberation by people like Bruce Willis or Haley Joel Osment. And rather than a yes or no on the apocalypse, the ending plumps for 'probably'.

In a sub-genre where you're competing with Evil Dead 2 and The Cabin In The Woods, you have to go big or go home. A Knock At The Cabin goes medium.

Rating: unremarkable

Evil Dead Rise (2023)

SPOILERS BELOW

It's fine, it's an okay horror movie mostly doing stuff that we've seen many times, with some Evil Dead dressing on top but none of those movies' character or invention or cruel wit. It had a few nicely executed moments like the corpse's eyes slapping back open, or watching carnage unfold through a front door peephole and the combo-Deadite was pretty cool even if it was very The Thing and not as cool as the weirder Evil Dead 2 monsters, but mostly it felt a bit bland, which wasn't helped by the director only remembering occasionally that he was making an Evil Dead movie and the rest of the time sticking to bland compositions and editing. Also, it's the longest of all five ED movies for no good reason - they could easily have cut the pointless, lazy bookending segments as well as the pregnancy test scene.

I might have liked the last one a little more, can't remember. About the same though - some indie horror director asking themselves "what if I made The Evil Dead again except boring?"

Rating: Okay.