Scream 4

The kill count at ten minutes is five, halfway through it is seven, and overall, thirteen - not bad for an hour and forty minutes - so number four in the meta-horror series really drives the knife in for slasher fans, but even in an exercise this tongue-in-cheek - and it succeeds in being funny a number of times - it can be frustrating sitting through the idiocy on display: remember, Ghostface is a serial killer who has well and truly put a dent in the population of Woodsboro High on three previous occasions, yet in the midst of spree number four, as the body count rises, these teens hold parties, get drunk, wander outside into the dark woods, and play astonishingly tone-deaf "Ghostface" pranks on each other, making it more than a little tiresome waiting out the Scooby-Doo unmasking at the end.

★★★☆☆

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Madame Web (2024)

This much maligned Marvel superhero flick isn't so bad if you are not fussed by its relatively small (for superhero movies) budget or by its lack of male muscle and brawn (instead we have female teamwork and clairvoyance), and you need to be able to look past some weird dubbed voice acting that is never explained, but Dakota Johnson, a presence as light as a feather (like her mum in Working Girl, you feel she might blow away in a wind) is captivating as Cassandra Webb, a paramedic experiencing strange things in the lead up to her discovering by movie's end that she is a spider-enhanced superhero. 

★★★☆☆

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The Hunt (2020)

The Most Dangerous Game, the classic 1924 short story and its 1932 film adaptation about humans being hunted for sport, is not really embellished or improved upon or developed here, just retold with 1. more gore, 2. wet Tarantinoism, 3. modern weapons that mean the twelve victims who wake up in an elaborately constructed fake Arkansas are dispatched remotely and en masse - there's no hunt required; and, 4. weak political satire - the nebulous joke here, about increasingly partisan American politics, seems to be that the hunters are woke lefties coolly slicing and dicing Trump supporters while demonstrating an uber political correctness in conversations with each other. 

★☆☆☆☆

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