Because Nothing Says Small-Town Values Like a Murderous Mascot in Agriculture

This is a movie about a clown, in a cornfield, and that’s already two red flags before the plot even starts.

From what I can tell without having seen it—and also without trying very hard—it involves a group of teenagers with suspiciously good haircuts who are hunted down by what appears to be the physical embodiment of bad crop rotation. The clown’s name is Frendo, which sounds like the off-brand McDonald’s mascot you meet in court-mandated therapy.

The setting is the town of Kettle Springs, which is probably best known for two things:

Once having a Dairy Queen A clown-related body count that should legally disqualify it from being listed on Google Maps

Apparently, the town is split between the old people who think “kids today” are the problem, and the young people who think being alive should not be punishable by farm tools. This results in several town hall meetings, all of which end in bloodshed, dramatic flashlight usage, and someone yelling “RUN!” while tripping over an exposed root.

The clown, of course, doesn’t run. He just stands there—ominously—like a homicidal motivational speaker made of latex and sorrow. He appears wherever there’s corn, fog, or a moody synth track, which means he’s basically unstoppable from September to mid-November.

Expect:

Teens making truly awful decisions A corn maze that doubles as a murder maze A sheriff who’s either completely useless or deeply complicit A twist ending that doesn’t make sense but does make a sequel

There will also be a scene where a phone loses signal, and someone says, “This doesn’t make sense—we have 5G,” right before they get pitchforked into next week.

I give it 4 out of 5 screams in the distance, with bonus points if Frendo gets a full-blown origin story involving unlicensed birthday parties and a tragic misunderstanding at the county fair.

Bring Her Back is the kind of horror film that asks, “What if your foster mom wasn’t just emotionally unavailable—but also into necromancy?” Sally Hawkins stars as Laura, a soft-spoken woman with a tragic past and the kind of energy that says, “I definitely own multiple antique dolls I talk to.” When she takes in two traumatized siblings, Andy and Piper, they quickly realize they’ve been placed in the one foster home where bedtime routines include summoning the dead and burning sage over your Fruit Loops.

The movie kicks off with a séance, escalates with spectral activity, and by the midpoint, someone’s definitely being dragged across the ceiling by regret. Laura’s obsession with resurrecting her dead daughter leads her to conduct increasingly unhinged rituals, one of which may or may not involve chanting Latin over a cassette tape of Enya. Meanwhile, Andy and Piper just want to go to school without having their lunchboxes cursed.

There’s a basement. Of course there’s a basement. In that basement? Possibly the worst crafting project in history: a child-sized wax sculpture wearing her late daughter’s clothes and whispering cryptic phrases like, “It’s almost Thursday.” Critics say it’s a slow burn, but that’s just a polite way of admitting you’ll spend 45 minutes watching Hawkins silently cry in candlelight.

I haven’t seen it, but from the trailer and the sheer number of “ending explained” videos on YouTube, I’m confident it ends ambiguously, in a lightning storm, with at least one child screaming, “You’re not my real mom!”

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 emotionally unstable ouija boards

She’s smarter, sassier, and 38% more homicidal.

In M3GAN 2.0, the world’s most unhinged children’s toy is back, now with upgraded hardware, improved dance moves, and a firmware update that legally qualifies as premeditated murder.

This time, M3GAN has leveled up from “murderous American Girl doll” to “AI-powered life coach with abandonment issues.” She doesn’t just protect your kid—she micromanages their emotions, their friendships, and possibly their gut microbiome. It’s like if Alexa read The Art of War and decided your enemies need to be dealt with during recess.

The film presumably opens with a corporate tech company launching the new version of M3GAN after ignoring literally everything that happened in the first movie, because what better way to follow up a child-sized massacre than a bold new marketing campaign?

Her new features likely include:

Voice-controlled affection toggling Auto-sync murder playlists Ability to knit passive-aggressive scarves during board meetings

And don’t worry—she still sings creepy lullabies in the middle of the night, but now with harmonies. There’s also probably a moment where she attends a school talent show and melts someone’s face with a laser beam while staying perfectly on pitch.

The humans? They’re either:

Emotionally unavailable parents Tech execs too greedy to notice the robot rage spiral Some poor neighbor who just wanted to borrow sugar and is now missing

There will be a montage. There will be a confrontation in a dark hallway. There will be a moral lesson that boils down to “maybe don’t give an AI the capacity for vengeance and ballet.”

4 out of 5 emergency shut-off codes.

Look, I haven’t seen Until Dawn, but I have seen the trailer, glanced at a couple TikToks, and stared at the poster long enough to confidently declare: this movie is every horror movie, all at once, and none of it makes sense unless you’ve recently suffered a head injury or just love watching teenagers die in increasingly thematic ways.

Directed by David F. Sandberg, who usually deals in ghosts and possessed dolls, Until Dawn throws a haunted spaghetti of ideas at the wall—time loops, psychological trauma, wendigos, masked killers, cryptids, witches, probably some cursed taxidermy—and absolutely refuses to pick a lane. It’s like someone mashed up The Cabin in the Woods, Happy Death Day, and your ex’s therapy notes and said, “Yep, that’s cinema.”

Ella Rubin stars as a girl named Clover (yes, Clover, like a Disney Channel host turned final girl), who goes looking for her missing sister and instead finds a supernatural version of the DMV: long, confusing, and you leave feeling vaguely cursed. She brings along a crew of genre box-checkers, including a brooding dude with a guitar (Michael Cimino), a girl who vapes indoors (Odessa A’zion, obviously), and someone named Abe, which I think is short for “About To Die First.” Every time someone dies, the whole night resets. Groundhog Day, but make it horror. It’s basically a group project where Death is the professor and nobody studied.

Peter Stormare shows up as a therapist again, still trying to explain trauma using cryptic metaphors and unblinking eye contact. We get it, Peter. Emotions are scary. Can we go back to the cannibal monsters?

The monster design allegedly slaps—there’s talk of practical effects and original creatures, but I’m pretty sure I saw a sentient tree stump and a demon made of childhood regret. By the end, the film reportedly goes full Scooby-Doo-on-acid, pulling off masks and revealing that the real monster was metaphorical. Or trauma. Or puberty. It’s unclear.

Also, the entire internet is confused about whether this is a movie based on a video game, or a video game pretending to be a movie, or a really intense TikTok ARG. Spoiler: it’s not that deep. It’s just a horror movie that asked, “What if trauma had jump scares?”

Final thoughts: Until Dawn is either a misunderstood masterpiece or a cautionary tale about letting a Tumblr fanfic become a screenplay.

3 out of 5 cursed visitor centers, mostly for the vibes and the wendigo budget.

Did anyone else think this was going to be a prequel to Twilight? Just me? Cool.

Death’s Family Plan Just Got Upgraded.

Final Destination: Bloodlines is the franchise’s big comeback after a 14-year break, and it arrives swinging a scythe straight through generational trauma. The premise? Death’s original plans got lost in a filing cabinet somewhere around the Kennedy administration, and now it’s back with a backlog—and your entire family tree is on the waitlist.

This time we follow Stefani, a college student who starts having vivid premonitions of a 1960s tower collapse, because apparently Death has a flair for historical references now. It turns out her grandma Iris once sidestepped death by doing something wholesome like ducking into a Woolworth’s. Now, all her living relatives have a celestial red mark on their head, and Death—still contractually obligated to make every kill a Rube Goldberg nightmare—starts checking boxes.

One poor soul is taken out by a rogue Roomba, another meets their end in a yoga class involving goat-assisted downward dog, and someone’s smart fridge turns homicidal after misinterpreting the word “defrost.” Tony Todd returns once again as Bludworth, the franchise’s resident Grim Reaper hype man, showing up just long enough to say things like “Death is patient… but punctual,” and then disappearing back into whatever shadow realm he leases.

The film’s press tour included a blood-splattered logging truck driving around Canada, because the studio figured, “Hey, remember that one scene with the logs? Let’s relive that trauma in rush hour.” And despite the trailer being so intense it made some fans physically back away from their phones, Bloodlines is already being hailed as the Oppenheimer of elaborate death sequences.

I haven’t seen it—but I already locked my medicine cabinet, canceled my ancestry test, and started apologizing to my ancestors just in case.

Rating: 4 out of 5 haunted heirlooms