Dan Says its Alright

  The tagline for The Monkey is, "Everybody Dies, And That's Fucked Up". Seldom has a slogan summed up a film so succinctly. While director Osgood Perkins may have spent his career to date crafting slow burn phycological horrors he turns the volume up to eleven this time round with a gonzo and completely over the top, abyssal black, comedy featuring flying limbs and a ledger filling bodycount. Based very loosely on the Stephen King short story of the same name, the titular simian is an old wind up toy that plays a drum. Wind it at your peril however as every time the drum strikes, someone dies, usually in an excessively gruesome way. There is no influencing who it decides to take and no destroying it. The film opens with a father desperately trying to get rid of the unwanted toy and then switches to his twin sons, Hal and his placenta hogging bully of a "big" brother Bill. We spend a little time with them as youths in 1999, as the monkey reeks havoc on their ch...

  You would be forgiven for thinking Heart Eyes is a simple holiday themed slasher movie riding the coattails of 2023's Thanksgiving. While it takes place on Valentine's Day and features a killer dispatching people with a cupid themed arsenal of weapons, that is only half the story. What Heart Eyes really is, is a full on rom com with a slasher slapped over the top of it. How does that work? Thanks to a heightened comic tone and some sharp writing, pretty bloody well. Olivia Holt plays Ally, a love cynic who stalks her ex online and whose bitterness has seeped into her work, endangering her job as a marketing agent for a jewellery company. She has a meet cute in a coffee shop with Mason Gooding's Jay, only to later find out he has been hired by her company to fix her campaign and may be a threat to her position. True love sceptic forced to work with a hot new guy (who happens to be a hopeless romantic) under tense circumstances is a classic rom com set up and there is even...

  September 5 is based around the harrowing events of that date in 1972, when Black September took members of the Israeli olympic team hostage in the Munich Olympic village. "Around" is the operative word though as the film focuses solely on the actions and decisions of the ABC sports broadcasters who ended up covering the events live. With this approach director Tim Fehlbaum sacrifices in your face tension in favour of a love letter to classic reporting and changing of the guard in terms of journalistic priorities.  The film begins in the early hours of the morning, with the team preparing for a regular day of olympic coverage (not that there really is such a thing as a regular day of coverage yet, with this being the first games to be covered live via satellite). There is already some tension in the air around Germany hosting the games and ethics questions of live TV are surfacing, "you want to ask a Jewish man about the holocaust on live television?". Distant gu...

 Love Hurts is Ke Huy Quan's first ever lead role. After decades out the game and struggling to keep his insurance prior to his Oscar winning turn in "Everything Everywhere, All At Once", you can hardly blame him for taking the chance to front a movie. Unfortunately, in Jonathan Eusabio's directorial debut, he has landed in a misfire. Quan plays Marvin Gable, a cheery real estate agent living his best life as he crushes the sales game and keeps everyone in the office (except for his depressed assistant) happy with his home baking. Unbeknownst to his colleagues he used to be a gangland hitman for his mob boss brother "Knuckles" and when the mysterious Rose, who Marvin was supposed to have killed, remerges, big brother dispatches the goons to get some answers from him. Cue high jinks as Marvin battles henchmen kung fu style while trying to keep his current and past lives from colliding. It's a fun idea but nothing quite comes together in the execution. Th...

  Few directors can release films with same consistency as Steven Soderbergh (he averages over one a year this century), never mind in so many different genres. With Presence, he steps into the world of the supernatural. Don't be fooled by the "presence" of a spirit however, this is not a horror film, more a family drama infused with a sense of doom. The film begins with a family, consisting of domineering mother Rebecca (Lucy Liu), unhappy father Chris (Chris Sullivan), swimming star son Tyler (Eddy Maday) and troubled daughter Chloe (Colina Laing) moving into a new home. Things are far from rosy in the Sullivan household, Rebecca is involved in some unspecified shady work business and dotes on her athlete son (the whole reason for the move is to get him into a premium school) while showing little interest in her daughter, who's best friend recently died. Chris is fed up with his detached wife's favouritism and considering divorce while both the offspring are in ...

  Companion opens with Iris (Sophie Thatcher) reminiscing on her meet cute with Jack Quaid's Josh before accompanying him to a secluded house for a weekend of partying with his friends. Everything is normal on the surface but there are hints that something else is going on as Iris appears insanely dedicated to her boyfriend's happiness and at least one of his friends are a little off with her. Sure enough, a reveal around a third of the way in switches things up and the film becomes a bungled heist movie leading to a chase through the woods with freedom and lives on the line. If you have seen the final trailer for Companion you already know what the reveal is. I won't spoil it here for those who want to go in blind but it is fair to say this is, partially at least, a sci fi film. You may well spot the twist (especially with the Stepford Wives nod kicking things off) but something so morally abhorrent and potentially dangerous being completely commonplace and having so littl...