Coming soon, 13 September 2026

Seen before a screening of Hope at Marcus Point.

I found Hope to be a lot of fun and enjoyed how it confounded my expectations.

It begins with a fairly lengthy introduction in which a group of Korean rednecks who were going out hunting find a mauled cow in the middle of the road near the Korean Demilitarized Zone which, we are warned, has many minefields. The cousin of one of them, Ko Sung-ki, happens to be the chief of police of Hope Harbor and he is brought in to examine the bovine tragedy. Everyone reckons the incident to be strange since the animal wasn't eaten at all, just clawed to death.

 

The rednecks, er, hunters, head to the farm where the cow is from while the chief constable, Ko Bum-seok, goes back to town only to find a monster ravaging the town and slaughtering the population. He joins with others who have taken up arms but even their high powered rifles are powerless against the creature. Just when things look bad in a terminal way, another police officer, the lovely Im Sung-ae, appears with a grenade launcher that helps matters. For my part, I had those mines in mind and figured the beast would stray into a minefield and meet its end. But no. Instead it is hit by a large tanker truck and killed. This was a long scene and director Na Hong-jin did the right thing by not showing us the creature until he needed to. It was pure kinetic fun with Bum-seok being frustrated at every turn yet surviving his encounters with the creature. Oh, the lady officer's frustrated cussin' was funny.

 

It was also noteworthy that the editor let the scene in town play out before cutting to the hunters arriving at the farm and finding it having been laid waste. They eventually discover a spaceship in the woods and we come to understand that the creature was an alien. This is reinforced by a grotesque, but funny, scene in which a scientist resorts to a chainsaw to autopsy the dead creature that ran roughshod in Hope Harbor. Our peace officer heroes encounter another hunter, Yang-bae, who claims to have killed one of the aliens. Upon further examination, it was an immature alien that he killed which leads Bum-seok to conclude that this was the child of the alien that had killed so many in town - it was out looking for its child.

 

Our fellow humans converge on the woods where they encounter more aliens who are also impervious to bullets. Out of nowhere a new group of hunters appear on horseback. They seemed to know about the aliens and to be out for some extraterrestrial blood sport. Huh? The aliens kill everyone save our ragtag group of police officers and friends.

 

There's another long scene in which one of the aliens chases someone on horseback as the other survivors race away next to him in a police car. Sung-ae launches more grenades as Bum-seok attempts to get the man on the horse to jump from his equestrian perch onto the car.

 

If the appearance of those hunters on horseback was surprising, then the sight of an enormous spaceship emerging from the clouds all aflame and crashing into a mountain was downright astonishing. The aliens recognize it and the movie ends with them having a confab on their next moves.

 

For me, Hope was just a blast. Laced with plenty of thrills, chills, and spills, I appreciated that scenes were allowed to play out without constant intercutting to allow us to keep tabs on characters in a wholly different location. Seeing from the get-go that these aliens, the mature ones, that is, are impervious to bullets had me wondering if humanity would come up with a clever solution or if all hope was lost, so to speak. Sung-ae had some funny dialogue while the motley group of characters were all distinctive and had me rooting for them until the very end. The stuff that came out of left field may have left me pondering things but they never detracted from the fun.

 

I am glad to see that it remains in theaters here in Madison.

 

Trailers:

 

 

 

 

Finally something I'd go see.

 

 

While this is playing next month at Cinematheque, I will be at Gamehole Con when it screens. So I hope that it actually plays at a Marcus theater instead of being tantalized by a trailer only for the film to never hit a commercial screen in Madison.

 

Coming soon, 30 August 2026

When I approached the young woman at the box office about buying a ticket for the matinee of Buddy, I did not expect to be told that there was but one ticket left. But that is what happened.

Glad to see a movie that isn't a comic book superhero CGI fest getting some love.

Buddy was a fun, thrilling way to spend an hour and a half. The titular character is an orange furred unicorn host of a kids TV show. Underneath the Mr. Rogers-like sentiments of love and getting along lurks a heart of darkness. We learn that the cheerful host is rather sinister as he kills off the other inhabitants of the idealistic world of anthropomorphized mailboxes, backpacks, couches, etc. 

A hug brings the gory episode which saw one kid get impaled against a fence with Buddy's unicorn horn as his three friends flee over a fence and into a forest to a close. We cut to a family with mom, dad, and two sons. One evening at dinner the wife, Grace, looks at the empty chair across the table from her and screams. She has had a brief inkling of a gut feeling that perhaps things are not as they seem. Reminded me of Ragle Gumm's predicament in Time Out of Joint.

Not to be deterred, especially by her highly skeptical husband, Grace pushes deeper into what happened during that episode at dinner. Eventually as she slumbers on the couch, the Buddy show appears on the TV and she gets pulled into the world of the TV program - literally into the TV itself. On the plus side, a Japanese woman with really long hair does not crawl out. Once in the fictional land of Buddy, Grace assumes the role of the nurse, her predecessor having been brutally murdered.

The 3 kids attempt to make their way to Diamond City where they will seek help. Along the way they meet an insalubrious marionette and his human, um, partner. The kids find that the city is something of a chimera. Their long, perilous journey ends with the trio coming up on a model filled with Christmas lights. Buddy is on their trail and he eventually catches up with them. One hug later, the show resets and they're back where they started.

Things go down and the kids effect an escape. The lead kid, Freddy, makes her way to what appears to be a school but finds no one around to help her as Buddy draws ever closer. Instead she finds a room with a couple neural headsets sitting before a TV showing Buddy's show. In another she finds the program being projected onto a large screen across the room from a bank of CRT TVs showing kids of varying ages sitting on couches staring at the camera, presumably their TV sets. They are to be the next children pulled through their boob tubes into Buddy's horrific world.

This ending had a vague Backrooms vibe to it as we get an explanation to events that, in turn, requires an explanation.

When those 3 kids flee, they take with them the friendly Mr. Mailbox who, normally talkative, has been recently silenced by having his door ripped off. Mr. Mailbox was still attached to a post with a pointy end and I kept wondering when someone would get impaled on it.

Buddy was good, bloody, off-kilter fun. I loved that everything was just like the kids' TV shows of old - full of puppets and practical effects. The child actors did really well with only the odd look into the camera. Let us hope that we don't hear that any of them die of an overdose in 20 years.

I came in late and may have missed a trailer or 2.  Here are the ones I recall.

This trailer was really annoying and made me want to avoid the movie at all costs.

Then we got one for another video game movie. Oh joy.

 

Hey! Something I really want to see!

 

Coming soon, 25 Juli 2026

Seen at Flix before a screening of Her Private Hell which I enjoyed. I liked how the fog has settled upon the neon city with no explanation. It jumps between Elle's life and the dream world(?)/flashbacks(?) of Private K and I loved how they merged towards the end on the crystal world.

Since I enjoyed Under the Silver Lake I figured that David Robert Mitchell's latest, The End of Oak Street, would have a little sumpin sumpin arty to it but, after seeing the trailer, I became convinced that it was just summer blockbuster schlock.

 

Coming soon: 20 April 2025

Seen at the IMAX in Fitchburg before the excellent Sinners. If I was one of those unfortunate fellows in Plato's cave watching these, I'd know that summer is coming soon as there was a mix of big budget action movies and horror flicks.

This was a shorter teaser trailer and more of a commercial as there was no MPAA band preceding it. I don't think the name of the movie is in it. I thought it was Maybrook Missing as that's the website name that flashes at the end but the movie's title is Weapons, I just learned.