Trap (2024)

Inspired casting and a grim sense of humour help sustain the unlikely thrills in M Night Shyamalan's latest about a family man who learns police have him surrounded at a stadium concert and are closing in, but you spend a long time waiting for this "No Way Out" scenario to pop and not only does it never pop, there comes halfway through the movie a shift into a second and then third unwelcome act, as though even Shyamalan felt trapped by his plot contrivance, and rather than maintaining the black fun in these second and third add-on chapters things become mired in some especially unfun and longwinded expositon of the Psycho-endscene type.

★★★☆☆

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Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998)

With his scrubbing brush bristles for hair and comical way of Where's Wally-ing himself into every other scene, sometimes darting past in a sportscar, sometimes idling nearby in a green lorry and other times turning up in his grey overalls to stare through gates and windows, Michael Myers, the original movie's six-year-old-now-twenty-six-year-old serial killer, is an object of absurdity, not horror, in this retcon that has, for fans, the pleasing aesthetic of the original Halloween and the crowdpleasing reappearance of Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, now living as a boarding school teacher with a new identity, but is otherwise a movie that is over before it starts, blessedly short but a mere breath of a slasher movie with an overabundance of barely developed characters.

★★☆☆☆

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