Poché Pictures

The Walking Dull There are bad zombie movies, and then there are zombie movies so somber and self-serious that you find yourself rooting for the infection to spread — just to put everyone out of their misery. New Life, John Rosman’s 2023 “horror-thriller” (quotation marks doing a lot of heavy lifting here), falls squarely into … Read More “New Life (2023): A Zombie Movie That Should Have Stayed in Quarantine” »

The Devil Made Them Do It — But He Should’ve Made Them Edit It There are horror movies about possession. There are psychological thrillers about guilt. And then there’s Nefarious, a film that tries to be both and ends up looking like The Exorcist got rewritten by a Facebook uncle with a “Keep Christ in … Read More “Nefarious (2023): When Possession Turns Into a Sermon with Lighting Cues” »

The Legend Lives On… Unfortunately There’s something genuinely thrilling about urban legends — the whispered stories about haunted campuses, cursed bridges, and bathroom spirits that fuel every Filipino kid’s nightmares. But every now and then, someone takes a perfectly creepy legend and turns it into a film so muddled that you start rooting for the … Read More “Mary Cherry Chua (2023): A Ghost Story That Should’ve Stayed Buried” »

The Family That Slays Together, Stays Confusing Forever Every so often, a movie comes along that’s so ambitious it forgets to be coherent. Mallari, Roderick Cabrido’s time-hopping horror epic starring Piolo Pascual as three different people across three centuries, wants to be The Exorcist, Inception, and a family reunion gone to hell—all at once. What … Read More “Mallari (2023): Three Generations of Madness, One Endless Headache” »

“Live from Hell… it’s Saturday Night!” Every now and then, a horror film slithers onto the screen so confident in its concept, so dripping with style, and so gleefully wicked that you can’t help but applaud it — even as it cheerfully drags you into the abyss. Late Night with the Devil, directed by the … Read More “Late Night with the Devil (2023): The Devil Gets Top Billing, and the Ratings Have Never Been Better” »

Welcome to the Diner of the Damned, Where the Coffee Is Cold and the Corpses Are Fresh There are movies about bad nights, and then there’s Last Straw — a horror-thriller that makes every late shift, bad tip, and obnoxious customer feel like a walk through Disneyland. Directed by Alan Scott Neal and starring Jessica … Read More “Last Straw (2023): A Bloody, Greasy Slice of Americana — With a Side of Chaos” »

“Lovely, Dark, and Deep” is the cinematic equivalent of being handed a compass that only points to “vibes.” Teresa Sutherland’s feature debut wants to be an existential forest nightmare about grief and missing people; it lands closer to a park-service training video directed by a malfunctioning screensaver. It’s moody, it’s misty, it’s gorgeously photographed bark… … Read More ““Lovely, Dark, and Deep”” »

“The Last Voyage of the Demeter” takes one of Bram Stoker’s most chilling ideas—an entire ship slowly devoured by an unseen terror—and asks, “What if we made it longer, darker (literally), and somehow less scary?” It’s Alien-at-sea without the dread, Master and Commander without the mastery, and Dracula without the bite. If you’ve ever wanted … Read More ““The Last Voyage of the Demeter”” »

If the apocalypse has a customer-service department, it looks a lot like Dave Bautista in a neatly tucked polo. That’s the singular charm of Knock at the Cabin: it takes the end of the world—oceans rising, skies cracking, plagues popping up like spam emails—and funnels it through four apologetic strangers who show up at a … Read More “Knock at the Cabin” »

“Johnny & Clyde” is the cinematic equivalent of finding a smashed piñata and realizing someone filled it with gravel and old Hot Tamales. It promises a candy-colored horror-heist with demon garnish; it delivers 100 minutes of stale edginess, bargain-bin nihilism, and the kind of dialogue that sounds like it was improvised by a vape cloud. … Read More ““Johnny & Clyde”” »