Stanford‘s Hometown News Site

There are only so many ways to reinvent a vampire before the creature stops feeling like a vampire at all. VAMPIRE CARNIVAL finds a surprisingly simple way around that problem: its creatures aren't particularly interested in your blood. They're interested in the misery you're carrying around with you, and for Gemma, a grieving young woman already struggling to move forward, that makes her exactly the sort of person they want walking through the gates.

Dolph Lundgren has spent four decades looking like one of the last people on Earth who needed anyone's sympathy. He's six-foot-five, built like someone created specifically to fight Rocky Balboa, holds advanced degrees, speaks multiple languages, practiced martial arts at a championship level, and somehow turned a relatively small role in ROCKY IV into an entire career. DOLPH: UNBREAKABLE gets far more interesting once it begins dismantling the idea that any of those accomplishments made the man underneath them particularly indestructible.

Being fourteen is miserable in ways that become strangely difficult to explain once you're no longer fourteen. You're old enough to recognize the people you want to become, young enough to misunderstand almost everything about how they got there, and desperate enough for acceptance that copying somebody else's clothes, attitude, interests, or sexuality can temporarily seem like the same thing as discovering your own. BIG GIRLS DON'T CRY remembers that uncomfortable middle ground with remarkable clarity, and it doesn't clean up the embarrassing parts just because its protagonist is someone we're meant to care about.

There’s something fundamentally uncomfortable about a room that looks completely ordinary but feels like somewhere you were never supposed to find. BACKROOMS understands that feeling better than most horror movies attempting to turn internet mythology into something feature-length, and director Kane Parsons wisely spends much of the movie trusting the spaces themselves to do the frightening. Yellow walls, fluorescent lights, endless hallways, and rooms that seem designed for a purpose nobody can remember become far more threatening than another monster jumping out of the darkness ever could.

The best scores will automatically remind you where the film came from, but WALLACE & GROMIT: THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT goes a step further. Julian Nott’s music is basically inseparable from Wallace and Gromit. The spirited melodies, exaggerated danger, little bursts of eccentricity, and surprisingly large horror cues all feel perfectly suited to characters who can move from breakfast to monster hunting without ever making the transition seem unnatural.

Horror movies spend so much time asking us to watch closely that UNDERTONE immediately feels different by making listening the more dangerous activity. Writer-director Ian Tuason builds his feature debut around something almost embarrassingly simple: a woman puts on headphones and listens to recordings. That it becomes genuinely unnerving is the clearest sign Tuason understands exactly where his movie’s strengths are.

CORRUPTION opens with a young man being told that the life ahead of him should be guided by moral responsibility, then spends the next 82 minutes demonstrating just how difficult that becomes when everyone around him has learned to treat morality as negotiable. Mauro Bolognini’s 1963 drama isn’t especially subtle about the forces pulling Stefano Mattioli in different directions, but something is fascinating about watching his certainty slowly collapse. The movie isn’t really asking whether Stefano can resist one temptation. It’s asking how long anyone can hold onto an ideal when practically every part of the world around them is designed to make surrender easier.

There are bad ideas, and then there’s deciding to walk 49 miles because your car broke down. Doug (Gregory Fung) sees it as an adventure, while his best friend Max (Reece Henderson) reacts the way most reasonable people would. That difference gives 49 MILES MORE plenty of room for comedy. Still, director Oliver Cox eventually reveals that the ridiculous walk is only the excuse needed to put two longtime friends together when they have nowhere else to go.

The best idea in NO ONE WILL HEAR YOUR SCREAM arrives almost immediately. The 1990 World Cup consumes Argentina, entire neighborhoods empty as everyone gathers around televisions, and a killer realizes that there may never be a better time to murder someone. Every cheer from another room becomes cover, every match creates a window where witnesses disappear, and every game on the schedule can potentially mean another victim. It’s such a clean slasher setup that the movie barely needs to explain why it works.

Ghost-hunting television practically begs to be mocked. A group enters a dark building carrying expensive equipment, asks invisible occupants to make themselves known, hears something somewhere in the distance, and suddenly everybody is whispering about what might have happened. Richard Anthony Dunford’s GHOUL SQUAD starts with that familiar setup and asks a more important question: what if the people conducting the investigation were significantly less capable than whatever might actually be haunting the building?

Some movies recreate an older period of filmmaking by carefully imitating its appearance. CAREFUL feels like someone found a forgotten movie from another era, left it buried for decades, and discovered that everyone inside had completely lost their minds. Guy Maddin’s 1992 film borrows heavily from silent cinema, German Expressionism, early melodrama, and European mountain films, but calling it an homage barely explains what’s happening. Maddin doesn’t simply copy those influences. He twists them into something funny, uncomfortable, sexually charged, and proudly ridiculous.

There’s something wonderfully uncomplicated about putting a marble in a jar. Something good happens, you acknowledge it, and another marble drops inside. Do it enough times, and eventually you have physical proof that even during the worst stretches of life, good things were still happening. A MARBLE IN THE JAR takes that small exercise. It builds an entire documentary around it, gradually changing what those marbles represent as professional surfer Tatiana Weston-Webb and her coach, Greg Browning, move in directions neither could fully control.

Airi knows exactly what to do when a ghost refuses to leave. That confidence is what makes NEVER AFTER DARK, because writer-director Dave Boyle doesn’t introduce his lead as someone stumbling into the supernatural for the first time. She arrives with tools, rules, a practiced ritual, and the calm of someone who has done this often enough that fear has become part of the job.

LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS does a lot of things right, but one of the most impressive things it does is convince you that all of this belongs together. A lonely florist, a singing man-eating plant, a sadistic dentist, a love story, and a parade of musical numbers shouldn’t fit inside the same 94 minutes. Yet Frank Oz keeps the movie moving with the confidence of someone who knows hesitation would be fatal.

The skeleton suit is almost a trick. KRIMINAL puts one of the most immediately recognizable costumes of 1960s European comic-book cinema front and center, only to discover that its real weapon is Glenn Saxson walking into a room with complete confidence and convincing everyone that he belongs there. The costume matters, but the man wearing it turns out to be much more interesting.