A Sexy Blog

Is there anything more perverse—and perversely funny—than watching Hugh Grant, that perennial celluloid charmer, take a swan dive into villainy? In “Heretic,” he does not merely play against type; he dances into the abyss with silk gloves on, turning neighborly warmth into menace so delicious it’s almost camp, except nothing about his performance feels accidental. You watch Grant, and it’s like seeing Cary Grant slip a knife between the ribs—a delight so vertiginous you can’t help but smile before the shiver hits.

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.

Let’s talk about “Wake Up,” the latest would-be horror satire directed (or, more accurately, jury-rigged) by François Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell. This is a picture with ambitions lodged somewhere between eco-activist screed and cut-rate slasher—imagine if “Mall Cop” crashed head...

Every now and then, Hollywood hatches a marketing campaign so clever it's almost tempting to review the movie poster and be done with it. “Longlegs,” the latest generation of viral internet bogeyman, slithered into theaters on a fog of clickbait. It arrived, stuffed to the gills with promises—a “new Silence of the Lambs,” “the scariest movie of the century!”—as if mere dread could be manufactured wholesale, like bootleg perfume. I kept waiting for the stench of brimstone to hit me in the nose, but mostly all I caught was the distinct aroma of overbaked expectation.

Let’s not pretend that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice—yes, the title practically goads you into saying it twice—enters a landscape desperate for more reanimated ’80s phantoms. We have sequels popping up like dandelions in the same graveyard Tim Burton loves to till, but this one… well, I found myself in th...

Let’s not pretend otherwise: “The Beyond” is not a movie that stoops to court your comprehension, let alone your approval. The first thing to say about Lucio Fulci’s 1981 Southern Gothic splatter opera—this fever-dream of congealed dread, oozing viscera, and poetic free-association—is that it laughs in the face of what most filmgoers consider narrative logic. But in so doing, it offers up a delirious orgy of supernatural delirium the likes of which American genre fare, buttoned-up and market-tested, wouldn’t dare attempt.

Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” doesn’t so much open as splatter all over you—like the world’s glitziest acid reflux. Within minutes, you’re somewhere between elation and nausea, the kind that reminds you why you ever loved horror in the first place: it’s meant to rattle not just your nerves but your very sense of what it means to be flesh and woman and watched. Walk in expecting a demure little metaphor about aging, and you’ll find your hands, as mine were, gripping the seat in a bright, queasy trance.

This is supposed to be the season of goodwill, eggnog, and the kind of joy you’re only ever forced to feel in December. But what do we actually get? Sleigh bells drowned out by sirens, cinnamon-scented pandemonium—yes, Virginia, it’s time for movies that crank the holiday insanity to eleven. If Christmas is a circus, why settle for gentle elephants when you could have rabid reindeer? My Christmas list, this year, is for those who like their tinsel twisted: Gremlins, Violent Night, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and, yes, Terrifier 3. Fasten your seatbelt with a candy cane.

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.