A Sexy Blog

Let’s not kid ourselves: there’s a certain thrill in seeing a name like Jessica Alba headline a streaming movie after years of cinematic absence—a return, we hope, on par with a Barbra Streisand coming-out concert or, hell, just a slap of fresh paint on tired walls. But nobody warned me that “Trigger Warning”—with a title practically begging for meme-ification—would showcase less a comeback than a one-way trip to career purgatory; it stumbles onto Netflix drier than a box of saltines on the wrong side of the apocalypse.

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.

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.

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.

Soi Cheang’s Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In is a brash, full-throttle collision—Gangs of New York after a few rounds with Kung Fu Hustle. What a galvanizing jolt to the system: to step into a movie that practically dares you to remember your youth, back when Hong Kong cinema was deliriously off the leash, and the formula for a good time was a heroic bloodbath, some dirt under the nails, and a soundtrack of testosterone and betrayal. Here, Cheang invites us to mainline nostalgia—this is genre-movie pleasure as pure, as heady, as chow fun in a back alley at 2 a.m.

Take Cover — the title suggests a mad dash and a hearty thud behind the nearest flaming oil drum, but what you get, with Scott Adkins at the prow, is something slyer and more self-aware. This is action cinema with a sly wink—half tactical ballet, half armchair philosophy, and more than a few swigs of that fizzy stuff called character charm.