Hope Madden reviews The Cycle, the Shudder original from The Head Hunter director Jordan Downey that turns a police procedural into a creature feature. Deborah Ann Woll brings quiet power to a forensic case with a very personal twist, and a few monster moments impress. It runs long, but Spooky Season fans after throwback cinema will find a lot to like.
Hope Madden’s Crawlers review finds little beneath the story but no shortage of killer spiders, as Matilda Lutz and her neighbours are sealed inside an infested Los Angeles apartment building. Ángel Gómez Hernández’s spider horror movie builds its tension floor by floor and leaves its audience scratching in their seats.
Julia Kowalski’s Her Will Be Done is a French folk horror film about Naw, a young woman on her Polish migrant family’s farm who fears she carries her mother’s curse. Hope Madden finds a mystery held together by Maria Wróbel’s wordless performance, with Roxane Mesquida as the neighbour whose return turns everything into a backward fairy tale.
Joko Anwar locks a meek journalist in a brutal Indonesian prison, and the bodies soon start piling up. Hope Madden finds a prison horror film that is slow to turn scary but full of gory horror comedy, a likeable cast and a surprisingly good heart. Our Ghost in the Cell review weighs the carnage against the camaraderie.
Nikias Chryssos turns an elite tennis academy into a gory, darkly funny sports horror in Bloody Tennis, now on Shudder. Hope Madden finds a strong lead in Sandra Guldberg Kampp and a gleefully committed Elina Löwensohn. This Suspiria-inspired horror has plenty of blood, but not quite enough mystery to linger.
Hope Madden reviews Never After Dark, Dave Boyle’s Japanese ghost story about a travelling medium sent to a remote inn. Moeka Hoshi leads a slow burn horror that borrows the look of early 90s J-horror without feeling borrowed. It takes its time as a supernatural thriller, then gets nasty when it counts.
Hope Madden reviews Raymond Creamer’s Goody Goody, a pregnancy horror feature debut built around two performances that do the heavy lifting. Samantha Robinson and Colleen Foy anchor a slow burn shift from cabin set dread into full blown creature feature, with results that mostly earn their transformation.
