NATHN WEINBENDER:
In the weeks leading up to Halloween, I always get in the mood to watch nothing but horror movies. And there are a lot of options out there. Here’s a rundown of some of the new horror movies I’ve seen that you can also watch right now—some of which are treats, others more like tricks.
I’ll start with a movie that opened in theaters this weekend—Smile 2, which is an improvement on the surprise horror hit from a couple years ago. It’s again about the malevolent curse that causes you to have visions of people with unsettling rictus grins. This time around, the afflicted is a pop star named Skye Riley, who’s launching a comeback a year after a terrible accident. Writer-director Parker Finn mines the insane stresses of being a scorned woman in the public eye, and the movie would still be scary without the smiling demons. It also has an appealing streak of nasty humor, some fun visual flourishes, and an excellent central performance by Naomi Scott.
Next up is Sleep, an effective South Korean psychological thriller from first-time writer-director Jason Yu. It starts with a couple expecting a baby. The husband (the late Lee Sun-kyun of Parasite) begins sleepwalking out of nowhere. His wife (Jung Yu-mi) isn’t immediately concerned, but his symptoms intensify: He’s scratching his face, he’s eating raw meat out of the fridge, and then strange things happen to the family dog. This domestic nightmare is available for rent on Apple TV.
From South Korea to Ireland: Oddity is a bizarre ghost story that mostly takes place in an Irish castle that’s under renovation and concerns the strange things that happen to the couple that live there. This movie has enough ideas to populate a dozen films: there’s a psychic, a shop full of cursed items, a hospital for the criminally insane, and a mannequin-sized monster that you want to look away from but can’t. It’s streaming on Shudder and is available for digital rental on other platforms.
Salem’s Lot is based on one of Stephen King’s earliest novels, and it’s now streaming on Max two years after its theatrical release was canceled. The book, like much of King’s work, was about small-town prejudices manifesting as real evil. Here it’s watered down into a pretty typical vampire thriller. This might be the case of a butchered movie: Director Gary Dauberman’s original cut was apparently a whole hour longer, the same length as Tobe Hooper’s 1979 miniseries adaptation, and delved more into the personalities and motivations of its ensemble. Now it’s about a bunch of characters who we never come to understand or know.
Finally is Speak No Evil, which played in theaters last month and is now available as a digital rental. An American family and a British family meet on vacation, and the Americans agree to stay at the Brits’ country cottage, where they discover their new friends have an odd idea of hospitality. This is a remake of a more disturbing Danish film, and like the 1993 English language remake of The Vanishing, this takes the existential horror of the original’s ending and makes it more palatable for a multiplex audience. Still, it’s the kind of movie that has you screaming advice at the characters, and it has a genuinely scary performance by James McAvoy as the father from hell.
For Spokane Public Radio, I'm Nathan Weinbender.
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Nathan Weinbender is a film critic and one of the regular co-hosts for Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM on KPBX and Saturday afternoons at 1:30 PM on KSFC.