Wolf man (2025)

The poignant family drama at the start suggests something interesting will follow — perhaps the strong cast is getting you ready for creature chills and spills that mean something to the family psychology – and don't forget director Leigh Whannel did something interesting in 2020's The Invisible Man – except once Wolf Man's family retreats to a cabin in the woods, complete ennui devours the movie and the cast: there are scenes where the two leads literally stand opposite each other and appear not to know what they should do or day to continue the scene, and the whole movie amounts to one single tiresome werewolf-transition scene extrapolated to movie-length.

★☆☆☆☆

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Saw (2004)

Given the fact there is a serial killer, Jigsaw, playing philosophically-motivated torture games, that comic actor Carly Elwes plays a rubber-faced Ash-like doctor whom it is sometimes hard to take seriously, and that Ken Leung's Steven Singh is a David Mills replica, it is entirely possible this original movie of director James Wan's Saw series was intended as a parody of Se7en, but whether that is true or not, the story of two men waking up in a puzzle box was taken seriously enough to spawn a long-running series of gruesome horror thrillers, and this original movie is possibly even responsible for the birth of the Escape Room craze that took over the world in the year of Saw's release, 2004.

★★★☆☆

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The Invisible Man (2020)

It is a shame that this horror thriller, one that surprises by being more about a controlling, abusive relationship than the scifi gimmick of invisibility and a movie that begins thrillingly and proceeds unhurriedly and parcels out information so intelligently for its first half, is in such a rush to finish and remains so nasty, so thankless - the satisfaction of Elizabeth Moss's victim's eventual fight-back against her diabolical, unseen tormentor is brief and the intelligence of the script drops off sharply in the end.

★★★☆☆

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Upgrade (2018)

RMIT Melbourne film school success story, Leigh Whannell keeps his high-octane revenge thriller, an exceedingly violent sci-fi, surprisingly fresh for a movie that simply rehashes Robocop with Tom Hardy lookalike, Logan Marshall-Green, playing the victim of brutal violence that leaves his girlfriend dead and him a quadriplegic...until he is upgraded by a Venom-like technology implant.

★★★★☆

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Insidious Chapter 2 (2013)

Don't expect to be a Rhodes Scholar in the ways of the Further after watching this - just how people pass into and through director James Wan's evil limbo, the Further, introduced in the original Insidious but further elaborated upon in this sequel, seems to no longer depend upon a character being dead - alive or injured or even merely remembered people can hang out there now, so more than before it resembles something like a train station, but still it is never satisfactorily explained - and there are other areas lacking elucidation: scene by scene you'll have trouble keeping track of whose house everyone is in - the Lamberts' or Elise's? - and you'll become dizzy trying to keep track of all the versions of Patrick Wilson's character, Josh, who appears simultaneously as a kid, as an adult, as an adult in memories, as an adult in the Further, as an imposter in each of those places, in flashback sequences as each of those incarnations; and would someone please pick up that baby walker because I don't want to watch a fourth and fifth adult come down those stairs to investigate the piano only to get a jump when the baby walker comes alive with noise and light, again.

★★☆☆☆

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Insidious (2010)

A dopey demon possession story that has nowhere to go except to get increasingly silly, with Rose Byrne and Patrick Wilson playing parents of an incessantly crying infant and a possessed boy, all of them helpless in a whirlwind of opening and closing doors, banging furniture, and the most insidious thing, boredom.

★★☆☆☆

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