What a dazzling corker of an opening! The camera cranes down to the marquee of a health facility and suddenly lightning strikes on the sign. Henceforth the club is “Death Spa” and cinematographer Arledge Armenaki lurks around the corridors with a voyeuristic point-of-view. In a steam room, a curvaceous dancer sensually caresses her body until the temperature increases and she is practically simmering inside.

The preternatural occurrences at the clinic are malevolently ineffable except that director Michael Fischa must’ve sublet the location and quickly doodled a rough outline sans revisions during the production phase. The culprit behind the lunacy could be a possessed artificial intelligence system for the equipment.

Yet how could glitches in the programming tamper with the bolts on a diving board? Queries such as this only accentuate what a colossally muddled mess ‘Death Spa’ is. Somehow owner Michael Evans’s (William Bumiller) handicapped, revenant wife and her miscarried baby might be suspects.

Horror icon Ken Foree is the janitor but he is deprived of any avenging-hero moments. The co-financiers’ refusal to cancel the Mardi Gras festivities is the equivalent to the Amity mayor’s obliviousness in ‘Jaws’. With such a potent setting, chemical burns and midsection tears are ancillary to the smutty, peephole high jinx of women in the shower and various other states of disrobing.

The resolution to the phantasm happenings is deliriously incoherent and in hindsight, a jeering insult to the drag community. This is a film that is a laughable guilty pleasure (the voracious fish attack specifically) in some circles but it is too aridly Agatha Christie for its own turpitude.

‘The Hunt’ is Blumhouse’s archly hipster, redundant rendition of ‘The Most Dangerous Game’ with liberal dosages of presumptuous gallows humor which never materialize into talking-head laughs (the anti-elite lines are mortifying edentate- “We’re gonna be on Hannity…Just like those two Jew boys that fucked Nixon up.”).

Instantly by lobbing buzzwords like “deplorables”, “snowflake” and “crisis actors”, scribes Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof pander to the sectarian political factions. The mystery-box asterisk around the premise is highly pellucid from the plane kidnapping of several innocents who are paralogical in their self-preservation (ex. Why would someone crowbar open a crate that could be a boobytrap?).

The gore quotient is embellished to Eli Roth gratuity with an eyeball nerve skewered by a stiletto heel and another bystander in a pit of spikes. However, their collective reactions are incredulously lackadaisical or narcotized as if they were superficial, exasperating paper cuts.
More than once, Craig Zobel tergiversates the Jane Leigh rule of bankable billing as a safeguard for longevity. When Yoga Pants (‘American Horror Story’s Emma Roberts) is sniped within minutes of awakening, the shock value of other stars on the chopping block dissipates rapidly.

The social commentary about left-wing versus right-wing is lip service next to the ganglionated vomitorium in Manorgate’s “Arkansas”. The symposiums about gun control, climate change, immigration and the euphemism of “African-Americans” over “blacks” are broached with sound-byte simplicity.

‘The Wolf of Snow Hollow’ is an enjoyably blithe horror-comedy hybrid for Jim Cummings’ trifecta of headliner, writer and director and beyond that, it is a bittersweet epitaph for Robert Forster whose gravitas stratify this lycanthrope tale to snowbound film noir on the wavelength of Coen Brothers (“You feel like you’re having a heart attack? Right now?” “Nah, since August.”).

For connoisseurs of the werewolf subgenre, the litmus test is the tenable efficacy of the transmogrification effects and the creature itself. In that respect, the lupine menace is a wooly, bipedal victory for suitimation. Unfortunately, its appearances are unconscionably scant.

With pulchritudinous shots of the full moon, Cummings engraves a brooding aura before the slice-and-dice escapades. Cummings is naturalistically deadpan and occasionally splenetic as Officer John Marshall. His quarrelsome behavior at a forensic crime scene is an example of his folksy sensibility.

The quixotical murder-in-a-small-town singularity is a mainstay of the Coens since ‘Blood Simple’ and Cummings is at the tangential in-jokes of the ski-resort municipality. Surprisingly, all the victims’ peripheral backstories are juicy such as a politically correct couple on the precipice of a betrothal and a jilted slopes instructor.

Although he is mostly ambidextrous, Cummings doesn’t always titrate the recipe between yuk-yuks and teeth-chattering terror precisely such as a postmortem interview with survivor PJ Palfrey (Jimmy Tatro), but, at a lean 83 minutes, the asymmetry is hardly an impediment.

‘Antebellum’ is a punishingly self-congratulatory, crystalline thriller with an egregious exploitation of the nation’s dehumanization of Nubian citizens to the point of non-minority prejudice (Jena Malone is defiantly overacting as Elizabeth, a Caucasian succubus who obviates eye contact with “inferior” ethnicities).

Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz immediately rankles the viewers’ kneejerk reactions to plantations, confederate soldiers in formation and African-American slaves laundering clothes. Much of the storyboarding must’ve been splurged on the voluptuous opening-credit sequence dolly across the property and onto the battlefield.

Unlike the allegorical puissance of ‘Tales from the Hood’, the filmmakers are merely retroactive to lynchings and systemic racism. The torso branding and subsequent rape of Eden (Janelle Monae) along with a miscarriage are too extortionate for a film which is ultimately a chicanery.

The M. Night Shyamalan twist around an anachronistic Civil War reenactment amusement park is tremendously hyaline and characters like the enceinte Julia (Kiersey Clemons) must be deliberately nebulous in colloquies in order to hoodwink the ostensibly gullible audience.
Also, the bombardment of cotton-pickers being savagely pummeled is a forfeiture to the ‘Black Mirror’ revelation’s fantasy contrivances.

Likewise, the dual directors are aphasic around the platform about how inequality hasn’t been quelled during the present- day scenes with sociological author Veronica Henley (also Monae). The scenario with Veronica is an orgy of abrasive zeitgeist terminology such as bikram yoga and non-vegan foodstuffs.

‘Possessor Uncut’ is a clinical, nonplussed grotesquery about the fungible nature of identity in an Orwellian surveillance society and Canadian auteur Brandon Cronenberg more than adjudicates how plainly rancorous monolithic corporations are and will be in the adjacent future.

Ala much of his progenitor David’s output, ‘Possessor’ doesn’t knead the film for the squeamish (the opening frame is a mucronate needle into the scalp). As Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough) in the aposematic masquerade of an African-American foundling in a track suit, is caressing the blood of her latest fatality, Brandon isn’t the slightest faint-hearted about the aberrant body horror foreignness of the scenario.

While the assassin with a science-fiction twist was emulsified in Rian Johnson’s magnum opus ‘Looper’, Brandon’s temperament is unremittingly moribund with Riseborough in a habitual state of dystopian entropy. Since Tasya has been so embedded in the avatar physiologies of other people, she is incognito with their own corporeal humanity such as her recitation outside of her family’s dwelling (“I’m absolutely starving.”).

With bleached hair, indigo pools for eyes and discomfort with domesticated ideations, Riseborough is distinctively self-ostracized. The macrocosm outside of the Milgrim-esque conference table with Tasya’s handler, Girder (Jennifer Jason Leigh), is fairly turbid about world-building.

The splashes of red gels refracting over the characters’ haunted faces is redolent of Mario Bava. With full-frontal male nudity and tooth extractions with a pitchfork, the NC-17 paucity of censorship is indubitable for the asthmatic and weakly hyperventilating members of the audience. The waxen reconfiguration of Tasya’s metamorphosis from herself to Colin Tate (Christopher Abbott) is dysmorphia at its most inwardly frightening.

‘You Should Have Left’ is a byzantine, paranormal thriller which is also a scalpel-sharp Tinseltown satire (e.g. The rhetoric of a “closed set” is verboten to non- industry outsiders like Susanna’s (Amanda Seyfried) scandal-embroiled husband Theo Conroy (Kevin Bacon) but not the latte delivery boy).

Exceptionally for a supernatural chiller with ombres chinoises, David Koepp glistens the May-December romance between Theo and Susanna with a beguiling afterglow and strangely, the sentient hallway light goosebumps etiolate in comparison to the self-help guru sessions.
Much to the viewers’ chagrin, the Bacon-in-an-Augean-handyman-outfit premonitions, a near car collision in Wales and a child-in-peril nightmare with Ella (Avery Essex) are routinely manipulative for traditionally blanched jump scares. However, Koepp is mischievously reluctant about the staple of the cabinet-mirror-in-the- bathroom gag.

Along with Seyfried, Bacon’s rapport with Essex is irresistibly cherubic such as his hastened answer to her quintessential question as to “why do people have to die?” and when she tenderly fondles her “papa’s” hand after eavesdropping on his melancholia.

The inside-baseball storyline around Theo’s prior wife’s bathtub drowning is a tabloid-fodder version of Natalie Wood and William Shatner’s sensationalized tragedian histories. While this ‘Stir of Echoes’ reunion isn’t as galvanizing, the domestic melodrama is quite strong.

‘Hubie Halloween’ is Adam Sandler’s bovine, stratospherically unfunny vendetta against the Academy Awards committee who omitted his nomination for his tour-de-force performance in last year’s ‘Uncut Gems’.

Systematically, between Canteen Boy, The Waterboy and Little Nicky, Sandler is pollinating a franchise of intolerably slack-jawed yokels on the spectrum. As per usual, Sandler has leveraged his clout for puerile celebrity cameos like Ben Stiller as a mustachioed asylum orderly with the flick’s most dadaistic, juvenile line (“Pee-pee while you sleepy”) and a plasticine Ray Liotta haranguing Hubie (Sandler) with a pubic nickname.

Sandler mongrelizes his dialogue in a nearly indecipherable Walter Brennan-like lisp that is no longer goofily addlepated. It is more of an affront to the mentally hebephrenic community much like Jerry Lewis’ tomfoolery in hindsight. It’s quite a dejected character study to kibitz an ultrabroad, asthmatic, middle-aged ignoramus on a preteen bike while being tyrannized by delinquents.

Projectile vomit, lawn urination and fecal matter on periodicals are the tastelessly scatological gags in Steve Brill’s paintbrush which align directly with Sandler’s lowest-common-denominator sense of humor. The freshly faddish joke that Harley Quinn is the costume de jeur for zaftig news anchors and women in general, is bungled into pestle dust ad infinitum.

Happily, in opposition to Sandler’s other Netflix forays, ‘Hubie’ is an exemplar of brevity with a running time below two hours. However, the running gag of Sandler loudly shrieking at prankster jump scares does feel like a listless eternity. The throes of coquettish behavior from the alliterative Violet Valentine (Julie Bowen) towards Hubie is insincerely fallacious despite Bowen’s sexpot efforts.

Slide-show photography of Montreal’s Starliner Towers is immediately unnerving despite being pictures of the swanky tennis court and delicatessen. It could be the wryly monotone instructional video announcer and how it culminates with the medical examiner on the premises. David Cronenberg germinates the groundwork for the epidemic thunderclap ahead with those images and how the doorman’s gun is “just an advertising gimmick.”

He doesn’t splurge any time before the hulking Dr. Hobbes brutally strangles a schoolgirl before defrocking her blouse and vivisecting her stomach. It is inscrutably outre and putrid and only Cronenberg could funnel the virus into his own psychosexual depravity. ‘Shivers’ is an unapologetically prickly, wildly titillating cautionary tale about the proliferation of venereal diseases and panic can be communicable.

Since this is a greenhorn Canadian production, the ingenue acting is intermittently callow. Normally the pseudo-scientific jargon about a parasite supplanting the functions of an organ would be a loquacious lull in a body horror film but Cronenberg fully enraptures the audience in the hypothetical pathophysiology and the plight of Nick Tudor (Alan Migicovsky), an office drone, who is hemorrhaging inexplicably.

The potshot about Nick retching a slug onto an elderly woman’s umbrella, is a glance into Cronenberg’s rakish facetiousness. From the zenithal tier of the apartment complex to the laundry room in the basement, Cronenberg ossifies the strata upon which the microorganisms begin to interlope.

The bladder effects of Nick’s abdomen cysts are uncannily repulsive. Honestly, the film might’ve been more consternation-inducing if the slithering invaders were incorporeal and could’ve been paranoid hallucinations. The eel swimming in the foreground of a tank during a conversation is eerily symbolic about the phallic mutants and engorged hormones. Due to the solitude of the high-rise, the film replicates the claustrophobia of the farmhouse in ‘Night of the Living Dead’.

‘Train to Busan: Peninsula’ is a faineant sequel to the exquisitely overrated South Korean zombie flick from 2016 and it doesn’t filibuster about pandemic theories (a pundit television appearance is the viewers’ only hypothesis and the acting is quite amateurish) when a breakneck pace is stipulated.

At this juncture, zombies are such wizened subjects that a dosage of military suppression is hardly resilient to the subgenre. While it might seem like a Delphic prophesy, the quarantine protocol on a ship’s lower deck is almost too pertinent during this Coronavirus outbreak.

Four years into the ordeal, ‘Treasure of the Sierra Madre’ is the granite for the picture with a temerarious heist at the epicenter. Instead of the overexposure on a dystopian Hong Kong wasteland, the hordes of undead are nuzzled away in pockets around the globe. It’s one of the macrocosmic innovations to the formulaic proceedings.

Aside from the lotophagous usage of zombies (which has been ablactated to death since AMC’s ‘The Walking Dead’ was renewed beyond season 4), the chimerical oddities are the only avant-garde creations such as the clustered hybrid inside the battle- royale pit.

With such pandemonium during the last act, it could be Gareth Evans moonlighting as the director with shirtless brawlers cudgeling their foes with wire-fu martial arts. The Sturm-und-Drang bloodbath is even onanistic on the chevroned T-bone car collision fake-out cliche while hydroplaning towards the haven of the naval boat.

Let’s all marvel at the fact that this blaxploitation horror flick is rated PG which was much more lenient during this era. While the boom mics are either hovering in the frame or muzzled with echoes around Count Dracula’s (Charles Macaulay) opulent manor in Transylvania, the frugal sound design is the only AIP aspect of this surprisingly baroque, sophisticated production.

Meanwhile, William Crain tackles some astute social commentary into the Dracula lore with Prince Mamuwalde (William Marshall) beseeching the bloodsucker to cease the slave trade in his homeland. Along with Macaulay, the caliber of thespian prowess by Marshall is royally grandiloquent. The Saul Bass animation during the opening credits is almost a parody with a bat flapping around while disco music serenades the spookiness.

Crain is refreshingly tongue-in-cheek about the taboos intermingling with Bram Stoker such as the homosexual interior decorators drolly salivating over the “camp” appeal of Dracula’s furnishings. The splotches of facial hair and bushy eyebrows during his vampire cravings would look fatuous on another actor yet Marshall is too glamorous to be a victim of crass make-up.

It is sensationally odious and prejudiced nowadays but the mortician’s “rudest nigger I’ve ever met” reply to a pathologist is side-splitting. As with most financially conservative affairs, the focus suddenly becomes fuzzy occasionally and the movie halts midway for a soul singer performance. However, technical gaffes only amplify the film’s irrepressible charm.

Marshall expertly equiparates the balance beam between winsome, tragically forlorn aristocracy and sanguinary, guttural fiend with protruding fangs. Without him, it would be glacial dreck for the black demographic.