Mehnificent

What we have in Until Dawn is less a horror film than a breathless round of charades performed at the world’s noisiest sleepover—everyone putting on their most rubbery "terrified" faces but nobody remembering quite what play they’re in. The filmmakers, with the game’s title in one hand and an empty grab bag of horror clichés in the other, seem to have asked themselves, “Should we tell the story so many cared about?”—and then tossed the question straight down the mineshaft.

If there is one thing the Netflix machine does better than most of the Hollywood conglomerates that blunder through genre as if they’re bobbing for apples in a vat of clichés, it’s churning out the kind of shredded comfort food that coaxes out your half-remembered adolescent idiot grin. Night Teeth is exactly the sort of movie you suspect you’ll find yourself loathing on principle—supermodel vampires, neon-L.A. nightlife, and a plot straining to be both “gritty urban” and “Instagram ready”—but, half an hour in, you’ve stopped counting the script’s shortcuts and started absent-mindedly tapping your foot to a bass-bloated, mortifying soundtrack. So: maybe you feel a little ashamed to admit how much you’re enjoying it. I wouldn’t blame you.

Has any horror film ever been sabotaged quite so thoroughly by its own intelligence (or rather, the conspicuous lack thereof) as 28 Weeks Later? The film begins with such ruthless, pulse-jacking precision, Danny Boyle’s kinetic ghost lingering over the savage, merciless prologue, that for a few brief, breathless minutes one feels the rare thrill of a sequel that might justify its own existence. That opening, with its madcap flight through a cottage-turned-meat-grinder and the image of Don (Robert Carlyle, desperately scraping together a character out of animal panic) abandoning his wife to the horde, one of the finest acts of cinematic cowardice, played for eyeball-widening horror and not, as is depressingly common, for laughs. As Don paddles away across the nightmare water, you even ask yourself: would I do the same? The movie dares you to admit it.

Oh dear, it’s always a little heartbreaking to watch a film trundle out its aspirations with confetti and sashes, only to trip over its own parade float and land face-first in the mud. Founders Day wants so much to be a cheeky contribution to the crowded boudoir of holiday slashers, a genre already thick with gore-soaked in-jokes and severed limbs of irony, but the result is the sort of limp, confounding spectacle which leaves you dazed at the exit, wondering whether you’ve seen a movie at all or simply sat through a particularly aggressive PTA meeting with unfortunate casualties.

Why is it that M. Night Shyamalan, who once roped us in with dead people whispering in the suburbs and left us breathless with a simple color-red, now insists on leading us into suspense-free rooms where the walls seem made of cardboard and the only thing at stake is your patience? Knock at the Cabin (2023) is his latest parlor trick gone flat—a film that opens the curtain on big, end-of-the-world parables only to serve up a dish that’s tepid, tidy, and quietly deflating.

There’s a certain kind of preemptive relief that washes over you when you enter a theater (or, as the streaming era mandates, your living room) already anticipating disaster, and then discover the film in question is just—well, not quite as calamitous as you’d braced yourself for. “Under Paris,” Xavier Gens’s new entry in the ever-indestructible shark-ploitation genre, is that rare specimen: a movie aiming squarely for the gutter, yet content to wallow in the predictable muck of mediocrity rather than launching itself into the fireworks of glorious failure. Reader, I was steeled for a catastrophe; I got something amusingly, frustratingly in-between—a B-movie so determined to be ‘meh’ that it wound up swimming in place.