Mackinaw‘s Hometown News Site

The least frightening thing about the Ice Cream Man is how he looks. Ari Millen’s vendor arrives in Bayleen Bay wearing his uniform, a narrow mustache, and the welcoming smile of someone trusted to park beside playgrounds. Nothing about him screams out panic. He simply waits for the children to approach, hands them something sweet, and watches them walk away with the satisfaction of a man convinced he has made their day better. The horror begins after they finish eating.

FUTURAMA no longer has to prove that it can return from cancellation. At this point, resurrection has become part of its production cycle. The harder question is whether another season can justify diving deeper into Fry, Leela, Bender, and the Planet Express crew after they’ve already received several perfectly good endings. Across the first six episodes of Season 14, the answer is an encouraging yes.

Peco walks into every room as though the applause has just been delayed, not denied. He boasts about becoming the greatest table-tennis player in the world, hustles weaker opponents for money, and treats practice as something reserved for people with less natural ability. His confidence would be insufferable if Yōsuke Kubozuka didn’t make it so entertaining. Peco isn’t merely convinced that he’s a hero. He has built his entire identity around the assumption that everyone else will eventually recognize it.

A wagon filled with cookies may look like a symbol of childhood initiative, but director Alysa Nahmias understands how quickly a sales goal can turn excitement into pressure. COOKIE QUEENS spends a Girl Scout Cookie season following four girls whose ambitions range from modest to staggering, revealing a tradition where confidence, family pride, community, competition, and commerce are packed together as tightly as the cases of cookies filling their homes.

Before the killer rises from the lake, the merchandise has already built a mythology around the corpse. VHS boxes, action figures, board games, posters, sequels, and increasingly desperate attempts to keep the Camp Miasma name alive pass before us as evidence of a franchise that has been exploited far beyond its natural lifespan. Writer/director Jane Schoenbrun understands that horror fans don’t merely remember movies. We remember how they were packaged, where we found them, what the cover promised, and the private meanings we attached to something dismissed by everyone else as disposable.

The alien spacecraft in HYPERSPACE was reportedly a six-by-five-foot miniature that weighed roughly 600 pounds and cost only $650 to build in the early 1980s. That improbable combination of thrift and nerve may be the most accurate possible description of the movie surrounding it. Todd Durham’s science-fiction comedy carries the ambition of something colossal while being held together by whatever money, materials, locations, and willing participants happened to be available in Shelby, North Carolina.

A missing cat receives more attention than the collapse of civilization. That imbalance makes perfect sense in PORTRAITS OF THE APOCALYPSE, where people remain preoccupied with private lives, family struggles, and unresolved grief even after the dead begin walking through Buenos Aires. The world may be ending, but someone still wants to finish an argument, conceal an error, or get a few hours of sleep.

Hearing loss can make someone responsible for solving communication problems that everyone else helped create. A missed word becomes their mistake. A conversation held over background noise becomes their failure to keep up. Asking someone to repeat themselves risks annoyance, while pretending to understand can leave them isolated inside a room full of people. HEARD examines that calculation through individuals who’ve spent much of their lives adjusting themselves to environments that rarely consider meeting them in the middle.

The adults in this film keep leaving rooms moments before they might notice something they should. They’re away at sea, lost in their own desires, distracted by grief, dulled by addiction, or protected by positions that keep anyone from questioning them. Children disappear while the village continues along with its normal routine. Robert Sigl’s film understands that childhood can be frightening without the supernatural because children are often expected to survive situations that the adults around them have chosen not to see.

An indicator light keeps blinking beside a dying man, repeating its empty warning while his mind struggles to explain how he reached the floor of an underground parking garage. Romolo Guerrieri doesn’t treat the gunshot as the beginning of an investigation. It’s the endpoint of a life already distorted by jealousy, sexual frustration, and a man’s belief that every person around him exists in relation to his desires. THE DOUBLE moves backward from death, although its memories refuse to line up in a way to provide a dependable account of what happened.

One fighter stands, another falls, and the bell appears to be the answer to everything. Director/co-writer Shūji Terayama looks past that temporary certainty in THE BOXER, finding an entire society of damaged men whose victories disappear almost as quickly as the swelling around their eyes. The film follows the familiar outline of a retired champion training an unlikely contender, then covers that outline in grief, resentment, theatricality, and the knowledge that courage won’t repair every part of a life.

The setting is ridiculous, the fistfights in empty swimming pools, the crowd being oddly dressed, and Jean-Claude Van Damme entering the space with complete physical confidence. Sheldon Lettich understands that an underground-fighting movie needs more than a procession of bodies collapsing in the same warehouse. Each confrontation gets its own environment, mood, and small dose of spectacle, giving a familiar formula enough variety to keep moving.

A surprisingly cheerful dinosaur sock puppet explaining how human bodies become bird food is definitely one way to make sure people pay attention. BIRDCALL begins like a children’s educational program produced by a government that has already accepted the end of life as we know it, using the presentation and friendly instructions to describe an avian-spread disease with horrifying consequences. The contrast is funny for a moment, right before the implications settle in.

Sex has become so scarce, or in some cases even taboo, in mainstream movies that showing adults openly wanting it now feels strangely confrontational. Gregg Araki responds to that with I WANT YOUR SEX. This loud, latex-covered comedy treats desire as funny, dangerous, embarrassing, liberating, and occasionally capable of ruining everyone’s week. Ultimately, I do think there could have been a more edgy version of this film somewhere; it played with that line, but never quite jumped to the other side as much as it could have.

Eight years into their relationship, Alex and Joey seem to be living entirely different versions of the same life. He sees a romantic camping trip and the perfect place to propose. She sees another reminder of how little he understands her. A SAFE DISTANCE begins inside the thought of that disconnect, then strips away everything and leaves Alex to decide whether the life waiting back home is one she wants to return to.