Movies

You find yourself at a “Terrifier” marathon the way you might wander into a crumbling, weed-choked funhouse: half-wary, half-eager, and maybe—against your better judgment—hoping to stumble out dazed, altered, or at least grinning through the scream. Damien Leone’s trilogy, born from a short so brash it barely counts as a calling card, is less a suite of movies than a dare. Sit through the whole grotesque pageant and you discover, under the shriek and squish, a saga that’s more about what horror can provoke than what it can explain.

There’s a peculiar pleasure—equal parts guilt, shock, and something close to glee—in tumbling headlong into a franchise you’d once dismissed as the province of adolescent gorehounds and basement-dwelling sadists, only to find—three blood-soaked entries later—that what you’d mistaken for mere carnage is, in fact, a nastily enchanting, almost romantic ode to cheerful misanthropy. With “Terrifier 3,” Damien Leone doesn’t so much revive his series as he yanks the franchise’s twitching corpse onto center stage, spangles it in tinsel, and hands it a candy cane shiv—a yuletide pageant for those of us who like our eggnog spiced with hemoglobin.

There’s an audaciousness in “Terrifier 2”—not simply the audacity to exist, but to linger, to stretch and claw at the very possibility of what a midnight slasher can become in 2022. Damien Leone, with the calm lunacy of a late-shift carnie, yanks his beloved Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton, a leering demon mime who must dream in Bosch triptychs) back out of cult infamy and puts him center stage, handing him the keys to the slasher kingdom and daring anyone in the peanut gallery to flinch.

Frank Herbert’s “Dune”—the shimmering mirage that has sent both readers and filmmakers staggering deliriously across the cinematic wastelands—is the sort of Everest that seems to breed not triumph but splendid, gasping misadventure. The mythos is so overstuffed, so cryptic and unyielding, that every fresh assault on its slopes promises a new brand of madness: what you get, more often than not, is altitude sickness in Dolby Surround.

When I first heard about "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga," I felt that distinctive, twitchy blend of anticipation and dread—the kind peculiar to long-running franchises and whatever anarchic fever dream George Miller might have stashed up his sleeve. The casting alone was its own Mad Maxian gamble: Anya Taylor-Joy—an actress as persuasively haunted as she is hypnotically camera-ready—marching into apocalypse territory, her porcelain features smeared in Wasteland grime. Would she disappear into the fury, or would she seem, as actresses so often do in dystopian blockbusters, like a Vogue cover model after a sandstorm?

The gangs of America have always gone Hollywood sooner or later, and in The Bikeriders, Jeff Nichols opens the throttle and lets the Vandals Motorcycle Club—outlaws ripped from Danny Lyon’s mythic photographs—tear through the screen like thunder in church. Here’s a picture that understands motorcycles as not just machines but battered totems of belonging, and it wears its period cool with such nonchalance you half expect the film stock itself to start rumbling.

Somewhere between the battered neon nostalgia of the original “Road House,” with its Patrick Swayze, Zen-and-fisticuffs swagger, and the pulse of high-gloss, 2024 bombast, I settled into my seat, half-expecting that singular jolt movies sometimes deliver—the kind that reminds you you’re watching a piece of pop detritus turned, against all odds, into folk art. There’s a peculiar ache that comes with these remakes: will the new kid on the block dare to dance like Swayze, or just step on my toes?

There is, let’s be honest, a certain adolescent joy in being bad for the sheer, unlaundered thrill of it—a kind of cackling, slippery impudence most modern horror movies outgrow in favor of handwringing, pious detours into “trauma,” and a double-locked justification for every sharp object. Watching Terrifier is like giving a chainsaw to the class clown and seeing how many teachers he can send packing: it doesn’t care about lessons, or roots, or the sob story behind the mask. It’s a daft, dangerous revel stripping horror down to the giggle you stifle when you know you shouldn’t laugh, but can’t help yourself.

Dev Patel, that gangly charmer who skip-traced his way into our hearts in “Slumdog Millionaire,” comes roaring through (or is it swinging through?) with his directorial debut, “Monkey Man,” and I have to admit, I went in with my soft spot for him already exposed. But what I found wasn’t just a talented actor flexing his new muscles—it was Patel unleashing a ferocious, turbo-charged vision, as if he’d been storing years of performance energy in his bones and it finally detonated behind the camera. What a high.

Civil War is less a movie than a diagnosis—the kind you receive in a stranger’s waiting room, where the tick of the clock and the hum of distant sirens seem to foretell something terminal, but you’re too mesmerized to get up and leave. Alex Garland looks at America as if it’s an elegantly set table that’s just been upended; the film drags you headlong through the debris, offering glimpses of the familiar and the ghastly, fused and inseparable, seen through the battered lenses of war correspondents.