Dear friend,

please welcome a new addition to my blacklist of one-star films. If you asked me, I would have told you that this category included just three movies (Mamma Mia, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, The Sweetest Thing). But Letterboxd stats list 17 films, some of which I don’t even remember watching (There’s Someone Inside Your House, what was that? ), some of which I’m surprised to have rated so harshly (does Old really deserve such a low score? ). So I could and will revisit some of them, one day, to give them another chance (I mean, I love ABBA music… maybe the version I watched, on a trans-oceanic flight, was terribly butchered).
That won’t happen with the film I watched this week, though.

Bullet Train Explosion/新幹線大爆破, directed by Shinji Higuchi, written by Kazuhiro Nakagawa and Norichika Oba, Japan, 2025 - ⭐⭐⭐

One would be tempted to define this film as Speed with a train, but then it turns out it’s a requel of a Sonny Chiba film, having the same original title, from 50 years prior.
Entertaining enough, although for a long part of the running time, I suspected it to be a promo for Japanese railways staff. Maybe it’s just a story about teamwork and resilience.
Also, the ‘resolution’ makes very little sense, but ok, that was unexpected enough.

Hell House LLC II: The Abaddon Hotel, written and directed by Stephen Cognetti, US, 2018 - ⭐½

Two of the podcasts I listen to have almost simultaneously approached the Hell House LLC series, so, after revisiting the original HHLLC to go along with The Evolution of Horror, found-footage mini-season, I have moved on to the second chapter to listen to Nuovi Incubi’s similarly-themed series.
I’m afraid I found it a lukewarm attempt to continue a franchise, with not a lot more to say except for a bunch of explanations intended to give more substance and coherence to the previous film. There is an actually unnerving moment featuring just a couple of legs, but otherwise, I got frustrated with the bad script and the cheap acting.

The Poughkeepsie Tapes, directed by John Erick Dowdle, co-written with Drew Dowdle, US, 2007 - ⭐

The next episode of The Evolution of Horror will tackle this film, so what else could I do? Mike Flanagan marked this on Letterboxd with a heart, and maybe the podcast will explain to me why this is not an unwatchable, insufferable, plotless piece of misogyny about a serial killer that’s incredibly smart. We know he’s incredibly smart because the detectives tell us on camera that he’s incredibly smart. Ted Bundy is a Hannibal-like character in this film, and that says it all.
That said, there is one incredibly creepy scene. The rest is just cruelty.

Heart Eyes, directed by Josh Ruben, written by Christopher Landon, Phillip Murphy and Michael Kennedy, US, 2025 - ⭐⭐⭐½

I was really looking forward to this, but finally, the result for me is fine but not great, and even as I write, I feel I’m already overrating it a bit. The recipe of mixing horror with another genre, which worked so well for Christopher Landon before, is only partially successful here. The tropes of a romantic comedy (meet-cute, first date, first kiss, supporting best friend, etc.) are all there, but in the end, it’s a reminder that a good slasher needs a lot of characters. If you have just two people at the centre of the film, the deaths needed to keep the film going can only involve secondary roles, but their demise doesn’t mean anything emotionally, and forced comedy is the only way forward.
Olivia Holt and 2020s Screams Mason Gooding are cute but a bit too smug. It was nice to see turn-of-the-century horror icons Jordana Brewster and Devon Sawa together on screen (the gag about their characters’ names is a bit… random?).
Very minor spoiler: the mid-credit scene in this is extremely similar to the last scene in another recent film made by people linked to this one, down to some identical dialogue.

The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear, directed by David Zucker, co-written with Pat Proft, US, 1991 - ⭐⭐⭐

I thought of this film every time Uncle Vernon appeared in Harry Potter.
Not as bad a sequel as Airplane II was to Airplane!, but it struggles to do anything new for half of its duration, and most of the jokes fell flat for me (additionally, every joke is underlined by someone doing a side-glance, I suppose to give the audience time to stop laughing. It’s so annoying).
Then the second part finally finds the right groove and some memorable scenes, including the one that targets the other Zucker brother’s serious film, you know, the one with all the ghosts.

if…., directed by Lindsay Anderson, written by David Sherwin and John Howlett, United Kingdom, 1968 - ⭐⭐⭐

One can easily understand why Stanley Kubrick chose Malcolm McDowell for A Clockwork Orange after seeing his debut film: ‘Mick Travis’ has the same chaotic energy as Alex DeLarge, and you can feel all the time that the character’s actions could very quickly escalate. But such escalation, promised by most posters for this film, only happens late in the film, which otherwise depicts terrifying scenes of ’normal’ life in a British ‘public school’.
From my ignorant point of view (there is a reason why I’m not invited in the jury at Cannes), there is not enough surrealism to make it interesting. It feels like at some point Anderson asked himself: ‘What would Buñuel do here?’, and then proceeded to add priests in weird places.