Viewing Journal: 8/31/2026

354) BUDDY

(2026 dir. Casper Kelly) Date Seen: August 31 2026

Undeniably amusing + I admired its total commitment to the conceit of being an authentic VHS artifact. Casper Kelly has become something of a legend in the world of short-form absurdism (see also Todd Rohal & Nick DenBoer) & his segment “Fun Size” was easily the highlight of last year's V/H/S HALLOWEEN. What are people colloquially referring to this cutesified sub-genre of nostalgia horror as? Kindertrauma? maybe Analog mascot? Whatever it's getting coined, I think this movie's probably a better example of it than something like MR. CROCKET or even Vigalondo’s surprisingly dull POOKA (though I personally worry this aesthetic may have peaked already with that “Clown Café” number in TERRIFIER 2).. Unfortunately, BUDDY has a short film’s worth of material stretched to feature length. The conceit is good, it just went on so long and I kinda wanted it to hurry things up.

353) THE PUNISHER: 

          ONE LAST KILL

(2026 dir. Reinaldo Marcus Green) Date Seen: August 31 2026

With the exception of one surprisingly moving visual passage —inventive first-person shots of Punisher’s departed family within his inner despair —loads of this movie's melodrama is just too overwrought. I know I was supposed to feel his sadness but there were lots of times where I held back giggles. Reinaldo Marcus Green (who normally does drama) got decent at staging action out of the blue & this movie's finale is pretty fun when all the fury finally boils over. The rampage Castle goes on during the climax has got physicality & a gratifying sense of impact to it, I just wish it didn't take forever to get there & maybe had some dramatic weight behind it. Honestly if you remove its ending & all the little umbilical cords attaching it to the larger Marvel universe, ONE LAST KILL's essentially a lesser DEATH WISH entry. + there's some astonishingly sloppy editing in dialogue scenes; parts that don't flow as much as clunk into each other. 

ALSO,

this isn't really a gripe against the actual film 

but just more of a baby bitch rant:

I wish someone would finally let Punisher wear his true costume! Must he always look like a hungover dude returning a lawn mower to Home Depot.. spare me the lecture about how the classic flamboyant costume would be “too comic-book” for his gritty universe, 'cause this world's got a green giant & a witch thumping around down the street. The horse of realism bolted from its stable years ago, so there's no reason he can't chase after it wearing them white gloves, boots, & teeth belt.

Viewing Journal: 8/30/2026

352) COYOTE VS. ACME 

 (2026 dir. Dave Green) Date Seen: August 30 2026

• CatZup Entertainment out here continuing to do the Lord’s work, rescuing a shelved treasure from an ungrateful parent company --while the WB the actual ancestral home of the Looney Tunes appears increasingly prepared to sell itself to the literal Antichrist; the objectively harmful & right-wing Ellison family (three cheers for late-stage capitalism i guess).
  

• COYOTE VS ACME is way smarter than it needs to be as an exercise in comic juxtaposition & spatial subversion. The toon world doesn’t just merely intrude upon physical reality, it also re-organizes its rules. + finally Dave Green made a feature worthy of the talent he showed early on in those FEARnet zombie webisodes from back in the day.

• I especially loved the design aspect of the Tunes themselves. Much like the Chip character in the CHIP 'N DALE: RESCUE RANGERS (2022) movie, they’re all technically 3D objects whose poses & expressions have been disciplined toward the graphic clarity of traditional 2D; Like freeze any frame & you could believe it had been ROGER RABBIT '88 style. After some of the uglier experiments with 3D in some of those 2010s O’Callaghan LOONEY shorts (Elmer & Granny's faces in particular) & especially all the post-"Serververse" trash in SPACE JAM: A NEW LEGACY 🤮, I’d been apprehensive about these characters making another jump to 3Dizzle.. Thankfully they look terrific in this movie. 

• There’s a curious fidelity here to the antique verbal music of old cartoons, to rhythms of speech & joke delivery that can seem alien in 2026. Like James Gunn’s two postmodern SCOOBY-DOO scripts, COYOTE VS ACME's lovingly clinging to an artificial form of banter, to the point where the humor almost seems aggressively clean. If I seem to have unfairly knocked this one down a star, it’s only because DAY THE EARTH BLEW UP set the bar so unfairly high in 2024. That one was just raw uncut Looney Tunes energy distilled to its purest form. 

• Jessica & I were blessed enough to see COYOTE VS. with a large crowd of diverse families & it helped me appreciate the comedy even more because kids were losing it over the simplest visual gags. You really don't need profound wit to recognize a toon character falling away from the camera & thudding into a cloud of dust is still funny 80 years on. 

• surprise witness appears during the big courtroom finale of this & it got me a little dusty-eyed. I had to pretend like I was cutting onions (unYawns). 

• Lana Condor is wonderful as always, & Forte remains a virtuoso of comic timing, but John Cena stole the human half of this movie for me personally: a wonderfully greasy corporate grotesque that seemed like the type of role Christopher McDonald would've nailed in the 90s.

• objection I have of zero aesthetic importance: The idea of Granny banging Peter Lorre is grotesque.
  
  

Viewing Journal: 8/29/2026

351) LEGEND 

OF THE WHITE DRAGON 

(2026 dir. Aaron Schoenke) Date Seen: August 29 2026

unfortunately the vast majority of this felt like a bunch of pre-vis rehearsal & camera tests frantically cut together in After Effects —less crafted together than piled upward. & It’s especially painful seeing the late JD Frank trapped in a character with so much brooding gloom, knowing what he was actually carrying in real life. He was an actor of genuine warmth & charisma, + more range than anyone bothered to discover (I personally wish BLOODSHOT had been him instead of Diesel truck)

WHITE DRAGON is thankfully never awful, but it is approaching mediocrity in a directorial sense; to the point where it almost makes the 2017 POWER RANGERS look hyper-competent. I do feel i need to say that it does feature some quality work being done in the costuming department. As a kid I always hated when Tommy the Green Ranger became the White Tiger-themed hero, solely because I hated the new costume that wasn't badass lizard green anymore. But the "White Dragon" suit in this had a pretty dreamy retro tokusatsu look, on par with designs like G1 Ken's (minus the cape).

[watch Joseph Kahn's POWER / RANGERS short, if you haven't already]

Viewing Journal: 8/28/2026

350) COLONY 군체

(2026 dir. Yeon Sang-ho) Date Seen: August 28 2026

It turns out Umbrella really was behind everything.. I'm just here for all the gooey & the nasty. This will probably be the gnarliest zombie film of 2026 until Cregger's "you know what" comes out

Viewing Journal: 8/27/2026

349) INSIDIOUS: 

OUT OF THE FURTHER

(2026 dir. Jacob Chase) Date Seen: August 27 2026

just 'cause you get out of the Further, doesn't mean you go into the stinker.

btw that CAVEAT homage didn't work for me. Kinda reduced the original imagery's inventiveness to a cheap carnival scare.. Hopefully with the bread this thing makes over the weekend Jacob Chase can do something more personal again. 

Viewing Journal: 8/26/2026

 

348) 

THE DEATH OF ROBIN HOOD

(2026 dir. Michael Sarnoski) Date Seen: August 26 2026

action scenes aside, this felt like

Bergman doing UNFORGIVEN (1992).

I was deeply mesmerized by most of it,
+ easily Sarnoski's best film to date

Viewing Journal: 8/25/2026

347) PEOPLE 

  WE MEET ON VACATION

(2026 dir. Brett Haley) Date Seen: August 25 2026

Proof a charming cast alone cannot carry an entire film.. Writing kinda plays like if Nora Ephron started a promising outline but then suffered a series of small strokes (Especially lousy 3rd). America continues to be starved of good rom-coms i.m.o.. which is weird 'cause the genre used to be our bread & butter.

346) PLEASE

(2026 dir. Anna Mantzaris) Date Seen: August 25 2026

Captures a specific ennui about modern loneliness, where everybody’s so desperate to connect --but then also (annoyingly) how all of our antennae feelers keep obliviously brushing passed each other right when it seems we're about to connect. [my first Anna Mantzaris film! Socks are properly knocked off, similar to when i first saw an Emma de Swaef]

345) CLOAK & DAGGER

(1984 dir. Richard Franklin) Date Seen: August 25 2026

Would make an awesome double-feature with BMX BANDITS. A pretty solid case study in visually economic storytelling.. That San Antonio River Walk sequence is superbly Hitchcockian. (I remember as kids my cousin Alex rented this dvd for our sleepover but i fell the fuck asleep)

Viewing Journal: 8/24/2026

344) TONY

(2026 dir. Matt Johnson) Date Seen: August 24 2026

YMMV obviously, but I thought this was a surprisingly stock coming-of-age movie considering the talent involved.. Banderas & the guy from HOLDOVERS are pretty good in it though. Why does it feel like Matt Johnson's visually more inspired when directing pseudo-doc/ found footage things? 

Viewing Journal: 8/23/2026

343) MUTINY

(2026 dir. Jean-François Richet) Date Seen: August 23 2026

Aside from a few inventive kills this was mostly a disappointment for me. Shame too, because I've enjoyed a lot of Richet's english language actioneers in the past.. SHELTER from earlier this year is a much smoother Statham flick.

342)

THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS

(2001 dir. Rob Cohen) 3rd Viewing: August 23 2026

25th Anniversary @ Cinemark

Always surprised when people still cry shot-theft over Joseph Kahn having the same 3D CG bit in TORQUE of nitrous & petrol flying through the engine combustion chamber. Cohen lifted the idea directly from Kahn's own 90s VW "Turbonium" commercial. + every other oil company duplocated that one ad nauseam still to this day.. (even if Kahn had borrowed the idea, I don't really see what the problem is. Especially within movies built entirely around images of vehicles) Shots like that are fun for a reason = why people reproduce 'em.

Viewing Journal: 8/22/2026

341) 

THE RIVALS OF AMZIAH KING

(2026 dir. Andrew Patterson) Date Seen: August 22 2026

Patterson finally following up his excellent debut THE VAST OF NIGHT with something! & it's a great one too --alive and assured in a way not too many films have been for me this year.. The opening hour of RIVALS especially were a strong storytelling thunderclap for me. (Also features McConaughey's best performance since KILLER JOE)