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The 2025 Mid-Year Random Awards! Mark and Megan hand out awards to their favorite 2025 movies, performances, moments and scenes. In this episode, you’ll hear them talk about Companion, Presence, Black Bag, The Ballad of Wallis Island, One of Them Days, Sinners, Eephus, Warfare, The Surfer, Dangerous Animals, 28 Years Later, Ghost Killer, Jane Austen Wrecked My Life and many more cool movies. Enjoy!
If you are a fan of the podcast, make sure to send in some random listener questions (we love random questions). We thank you for listening, and hope you enjoy the episode!
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Sorry, Baby (2025) – Review
Quick Thoughts:
- Director, writer, and star Eva Victor has crafted a fantastic film that expertly blends humor, trauma, warmth, suspense, isolation, and compassion
- I hope it’s remembered come awards time
- Naomi Ackie, Lucas Hedges, and John Carroll Lynch are wonderful
- Betty-Anne from Letterkenny is in it! Kelly McCormack is great.
- Lamb of God lol
There’s a moment in Sorry, Baby when the central character Agnes, (Eva Victor) is having a panic attack and can’t catch her breath. She pulls her car into a restaurant parking lot, and the owner (John Carroll Lynch) comes out to tell Agnes that she can’t loiter in his lot. When he sees she’s having trouble breathing, he helps calm her breathing and then makes her a sandwich. What’s great about the scene is that the guy is gruff as hell (and hates his trash collector neighbors), but he listens and shows genuine empathy towards a person who needs it (even though he doesn’t like her name). It’s a great moment that blends sadness with humor and is just one of the fantastic character interactions in the Eva Victor- directed movie.
Sorry, Baby focuses on what happens when a “bad thing” happens to a promising grad student named Agnes. The tragicomedy unfolds over several years that take place in five nonlinear chapters with different titles like “The Year of the Questions” and “The Year of the Bad Thing,”. What’s interesting is that while the movie is occasionally harrowing, Agnes’s journey is loaded with humor and will make you want to grill some hot dogs (or open a sandwich shop). The supporting work from Naomi Ackie, John Carroll Lynch, Kelly McCormack, and Lucas Hedges (who, between Lady Bird, Mid90s, Boy Erased, Waves, Honey Boy, and Sorry, Baby, is an A24 allstar), is pitch-perfect and proves that Victor is a director to watch.
While Sorry, Baby is centered around Agnes and her life before-and-after the “bad thing,” the heart of the film is the friendship between Agnes and her best friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie – on a great run with Blink Twice and Mickey 17). The other 2025 A24 film about friendship (conveniently titled Friendship) goes to some soap-eating places, but this friendship is healthy and filled with love. Ackie and Eva Victor have excellent chemistry, and the friendship between their characters feels lived in and organic.It makes sense that first-time director Victor scheduled the first week of shooting to establish the pair’s friendship, because their chemistry made Victor’s life easier, and they are very funny together.
The nice thing about the humor in Sorry, Baby is that it feels organic, because it comes from a person who uses humor when dealing with good or bad situations. At times, it’s used as a deflection technique (there’s a great joke about being “tall”) during stressful situations with doctors, college employees, lawyers and coworkers. At other times, her jokes (“Is it my baby?”) come during moments of happiness and surprise. The jokes balance out the serious themes because they are an obvious coping technique for Agnes.
Much of the movie takes place inside an isolated cabin that becomes its own character throughout the five chapters. One thing I noticed is that Agnes’ isolated home feels both safe and nightmarish. Whenever Lydie is around, the place feels like a cozy cabin surrounded by cozy woods. However, when Agnes is alone, every creak, crack, and crunch makes you think the movie has become a horror film. Victor deliberately made the place seem both “cozy and terrifying,” and I don’t think I’ve been more stressed out this year while looking at a door. Cinematographer Mia Cioffi Henry (check out the Mitski music videos she shot) does a fine job of shooting the front door from other rooms, which gives it an alienated and dangerous feeling.
To write the film, Victor traveled to Maine and sequestered themself in a cabin for a two-month writing session. The isolation paid off as the screenplay juggles a plethora of emotions while never feeling overly written. Victor can make an elevator ride wildly stressful, so it’s not surprising that the nonlinear screenplay successfully walks a tightrope and never lets the comedy or trauma make the movie plummet to the ground. It’s fun knowing that Barry Jenkins (Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk) talked Victor into directing the film, and that Eva shadowed Jane Schoenbrun while they were making I Saw the TV Glow. All the hard work paid off, as after the award-winning Sundance screening, A24 bought the film for $8 million and put their weight behind it.
Final Thoughts – Sorry, Baby is an inspiring piece of cinema created by a person who put a lot of work into making something original and unique. Watch it!
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Ghost Killer (2024) – Review
Quick Thoughts:
1. Director Kensuke Sonomura has crafted a fun showcase for his exciting fight choreography.
2. There’s a great gag involving salt.
3. Watch the Baby Assassin franchise.
4. Masanori Mimoto, Akari Takaishi and Mario Kuroba are wonderful
5. The world needs more movies like Ghost Killer. I love it when silly ideas are taken seriously.
Directed by Kensuke Sonomura, the action director of the Baby Assassins franchise (and many more films), and written by Yugo Sakamoto (who directed the three Baby Assassin films), Ghost Killer is a wonderful supernatural action comedy that features cursed bullet cartridges, apartment destruction, and a college student teaming up with the ghost of a hitman to battle an anti-social organization. The world needs more movies like Ghost Killer because it takes a high-concept idea and treats it with respect.
The film kicks off with a fast-paced action scene between a hitman named Hideo Kudo (Masanori Mimoto – The badass Frog from Yakuza Apocalypse) and a gang of knife-wielding opponents who fall prey to Kudo’s fast hands (and multiple stab wounds). To celebrate the victory, Kudo lets down his guard to smoke a post-murder cigarette and is shot by an unknown assailant. While he lay bleeding out, his grudge-holding blood covers the expelled bullet cartridge on the ground next to his body. This attaches his soul to the bullet cartridge and bonds them together. After being kicked around Tokyo, the cartridge is picked up by Fumika Matsuoka (Akari Takaishi), a college student who justifiably freaks out when she learns that the grudge-bearing soul of a hitman is attached to her. After discovering she can’t escape (and salt exorcisms don’t work) the “genuine ghost” because he reappears in front of her whenever there’s a 15 meter distance between them, Fumika decides to work with Kudo by letting him possess her body so he can kill the person who killed him – which will set his soul free.
The most interesting part of Ghost Killer is that a world-class hitman uses an unathletic college kid as his vendetta machine. When it comes to trained fighters, they know how it feels to absorb strikes, and they’ve trained their bodies to deliver punishment. However, the mild-mannered Fumika has never been close to a fight, and the first punch she lands makes her say, “That really hurts.” After each fight, Fumika is left bruised and battered, but she also really wants to get rid of the hitman ghost attached to her, so she endures broken ribs, bruised knuckles, and bloody noses. Her battles put her in the crosshairs of an “anti-social organization” that justifiably wants to kill her because she’s teamed up with the vengeful ghost of a deadly hitman.
During Hideo and Fumika’s supernatural adventures, they come across Riku Kagehara (Mario Kuroba), a hitman frenemy associate of Hideo who helps them murder people and clean up their bodies. The film builds to a warehouse brawl where the ragtag crew battles an endless barrage of gangsters led by famed stuntman and action choreographer Naohiro Kawamoto, who has a beautiful, rapid-fire brawl with Mimoto.
In the Baby Assassin’s franchise, Takaishi’s character Chisato is an absolute maniac, so it’s fun watching her play a normal (non-murder-y) college kid in Ghost Killer. Also, in Baby Assassins, Saori Izawa does most of the heavy-lifting during the fight scenes, but in Ghost Killer, Takaishi battles abusive boyfriends, jerk influencers, and a plethora of gangsters. It’s fun watching her take center stage, it’s enough to satisfy my Baby Assassins cravings as I wait for Baby Assassins 3.
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The Movies, Films and Flix Podcast – Episode 635: The Bikeriders (2023), Jeff Nichols and Denim
You can download or stream the pod on Apple Podcasts, Tune In, Podbean, or Spreaker (or wherever you listen to podcasts…..we’re almost everywhere).
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Mark and Andy discuss the 2023 crime drama The Bikeriders. Directed by Jeff Nichols, and starring Jodie Comer, Tom Hardy, Austin Butler and a lot of denim, the movie focuses on what happens when a guy watches The Wild One (1953) and decides to start a motorcycle gang. In this episode, they also talk about excellent accents, motorcycle movies, and the excellence of Jeff Nichols. Enjoy!
If you are a fan of the podcast, make sure to send in some random listener questions (we love random questions). We thank you for listening, and hope you enjoy the episode!
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Hot Spring Shark Attack (2024) – Review
Quick Thoughts:
1. It’s the kind of film that features characters eating submarine sandwiches whilst inside a submarine.
2. It’s about ancient sharks that can squish themselves through pipes so they can eat tourists.
3. It features the best shark punching since Lara Croft: Tomb Raider – The Cradle of Life.
4. It’s very silly.
5. If you’re looking for a random double feature, check out Evil Does Not Exist and Hot Spring Shark Attack. Both of the wildly different films feature important water, tourism, and corporate greed.
6. Writer-director Morihito Inoue has crafted a knowingly silly film that wants to entertain
7. Check out the website for screening information
The nice thing about the 80-minute Hot Spring Shark Attack is that it embraces chaos and wears its silly concept on its sleeve. It’s far from focused, but you can sense that director Morihito Inoue was laser-focused on making sure his crowdfunded film brought the goods. Inoue is a big fan of shark cinema, and his low-budget action comedy delivers an admirable amount of shark action and features the most shark punching you’ll ever witness in a single movie. It also features a helicopter explosion caused by a methane-spewing shark who comes across a tactical unit dubbed the “Anti-Hot Spring Unit,” who don’t realize their bullets will cause a massive explosion (it’s wild).
Taking place in the Japanese coastal city of Atsumi (The Monaco of the East), the film starts as a Jaws ripoff (in a loving way) by focusing on ancient sharks squishing their cartilage skeletons through pipes to eat spa goers who are enjoying the famous Atsumi hot springs. It then evolves into something akin to Sharknado as the hot water-loving sharks start attacking the denizens of Atsumi. It all culminates with an underwater battle between a buff guy nicknamed “Macho” and a large crown-wearing king shark.
Drawing inspiration from Jaws and Sharknado, Hot Spring Shark Attack is a lo-fi shark film that is loaded with an incredible amount of energy. On top of everything already mentioned, the movie features Influencer murder, anti-shark submarines, submarine sandwiches, weight-lifting montages, and sharks that require the smallest amount of hot spring water to pop up anywhere (seriously, anywhere). In a standout scene, an industrious shark sets a trap for tourists at the bottom of a playground slide and swallows them whole as they come down it (and it’s great).
Hot Spring Shark Attack pinballs around at a breakneck pace and feels like a collection of scenes slapped together. With a title like Hot Spring Shark Attack, it’s unfair to expect a focused experience. However, the looseness of the storytelling gives the movie a chaotic vibe, which doesn’t help the overall flow. The result is a loving homage to shark cinema that features knowingly cheeky performances from Daniel Aguilar (Shin Godzilla), Shôichirô Akaboshi, and Takuya Fujimura (One Cut of the Dead).
Final thoughts – I’ve now seen a movie featuring talking sharks squishing themselves through hot spring pipes to eat influencers – and I am very happy.
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The Movies, Films and Flix Podcast – Episode 634: Speak No Evil (2024), James McAvoy and Pointless Remakes
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Mark and Lisa discuss the 2024 remake Speak No Evil. Directed by James Watkins, and starring James McAvoy, Mackenzie Davis, Scoot McNairy, and a stuffed bunny, the movie focuses on what happens when a family has a terrible vacation. In this episode, they also talk about toothless remakes, Blumhouse Productions, and plaid shirts. Enjoy!
If you are a fan of the podcast, make sure to send in some random listener questions (we love random questions). We thank you for listening, and hope you enjoy the episode!
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John’s Horror Corner: Beezel (2024), a quasi-found footage, documentsry-style, monstrous witch movie.
MY CALL: This is much less a witch movie, and much more a monstrous, ogre-like hag movie. Your satisfaction will be much more visual than cerebral, as the writing could use some work to complement the solid monstrous and witchy imagery. MORE MOVIES LIKE Beezel: Well, for higher budgeted ogre-witches, consider Barbarian (2022) and Blair Witch (2016).
A quirky but very polite man, Harold (Bob Gallagher) hires documentarian Apollo (LeJon Woods; The Hangman, The North Witch, Ouija Witch) tell help him tell his story. Years ago Harold’s first wife and child were killed, found partially eaten and dismembered and covered in bite marks, and he has been scandalously presumed to be their unconvicted murderer. When Harold shares some disturbing footage of his deceased wife never seen by the police, Apollo realizes he is in over his head. But it’s already too late. Harold is a zealot in service to a generations-old monstrous witch which feeds slowly on the flesh of the living. He wasn’t the first to serve this flesh-eating hag, and he won’t be the last.
The gore is decent! Better than I expected. Some wince-worthy eyeball scenes, a head torn from its shoulders, some rough oral sex mutilation, a disturbing scene with a newborn baby… not bad.
Our monstrous crone looks pretty cool, smacking of Mag Mucklebones from Legend (1985) or the she-ogre from Barbarian (2022), and moving with a rigor-mortis-like rigidity in the legs and spine. Some of the witchy imagery is also great. We enjoy top-notch gross drooling, weird slow eye-rolling, and corpse-like staggered movement. There are some fun jumpscares as well.
This film’s better qualities are somewhat outweighed by its shortcomings in pacing, resolution, storytelling. Watching this, you repeatedly see something cool or gross or scary, get psyched and very hopeful, and never find any proper greater payoff. Things just don’t build as the filmmakers intended. This movie has some very good visuals, fewer good overall scenes, and never really finds any synthesis to make the film work. However, it’s concepts and satisfying visuals give me hope for director and co-writer Aaron Fradkin (Bloody Bites, Val) and his future work.
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MY CALL: I’m not sure if this is a “so bad it’s good” movie or more a movie that was once awesome but just didn’t age well. In either case, this is the Sci-Horror oddity equivalent of a long forgotten exhibit gathering dust in the basement of a museum—it surely deserves to be seen, but is too overshadowed by its more shiny, polished contemporary successors. MORE MOVIES LIKE Saturn 3: For more robots behaving badly, consider the delightful Sci-Horror like of Demonseed (1977), Moontrap (1989), and Virus (1999).
This movie makes its style clear right away. Geeks will enjoy visual spacescape delights, and gorehounds enjoy a man getting diced through wires while being jettisoned through an air shaft into space. One part Sci-Fi grace, one part chunky gore.
A pair of lovers and researchers Alex (Farrah Fawcett; Charlie’s Angels) and Adam (Kirk Douglas; 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Spartacus) on Saturn 3 are visited by a rigid, by-the-book official Benson (Harvey Keitel; Two Evil Eyes) to review their progress. Benson is somewhat secretive in his objectives; he makes his carnal, hedonsitic interest in Alex immediately clear; and he has brought a “demigod” robot to assist him. What could possibly go wrong?
Running on tubes of colored liquids and a core of pure brain matter, this giant robot (called Hector) is pretty snazzy for a 1980 film. Hector plays chess, performs first aid… and a gorily brutalizes Alex’s dog. More troubling, Hector actively learns from a direct brain-link to Benson, and thus Hector also is now infatuated with Alex! Yes, you read that right. The robot, which lacks genitals or an endocrine system to produce hormones, desires Alex. Oh, classic Sci-Fi, you rascal!
Trapped in their research compound with Hector, the humans must escape the station. The Star Wars-inspired special effects are solid on spaceship shots; cheap but enjoyable for planetary terrains harken closer to Doctor Who; and set design and visuals of on-ship tech is satisfyingly elaborate. Very good visuals for Sci-Fi fans abound.
Shockingly, this hidden gem was directed by Stanley Donen, who also directed your grandparents’ and great grandparents’ favorites Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954). Donen only ever did one genre film, and this one is a banger worth your time!
We end up with one really cool gore scene that likely inspired the likes of Moontrap (1989) and Virus (1999). Frankly, for a nearly 50-year-old Sci-Fi movie, this held up pretty well for me! I enjoyed it a lot.
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The Movies, Films and Flix Podcast – Episode 633: Star Trek Generations (1994), Boat Scenes, and Energy Fields
You can download or stream the pod on Apple Podcasts, Tune In, Podbean, or Spreaker (or wherever you listen to podcasts…..we’re almost everywhere).
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The Star Trek series continues! Mark and Niall discuss the 1994 sci-fi sequel Star Trek Generations. Directed by David Carson, and starring Patrick Stewart, William Shatner, Malcolm McDowell, and an extra-dimensional realm, the movie focuses on what happens when two captains battle a maniac. In this episode, they also talk about boat scenes, rock fights, and odd-numbered Star Trek films. Enjoy!
If you are a fan of the podcast, make sure to send in some random listener questions (we love random questions). We thank you for listening, and hope you enjoy the episode!
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MY CALL: Well, at least I’m one step closer to seeing every 80s horror movie ever made. That’s about the only positive I took away from this odd horror-drama. MORE MOVIES LIKE Eternal Evil: Maybe The Skeleton Key (2005) or Get Out (2017).
TV commercial director Paul (Winston Rekert) begins having out of body experiences during his dreams after learning about astral projection from an attractive dancer Janus (Karen Black; Invaders from Mars, Children of the Night, It’s Alive III, House of 1000 Corpses, Mirror Mirror, Night Angel). During these projections he essentially haunts those he observes, including his disapproving therapist. Some of Paul’s astrally observed victims turn up mysteriously dead from macabre, rib-protruding heart attacks. Now, this may sound really cool… if only it would lead somewhere satisfying. It won’t.
Meanwhile a detective is investigating these strange deaths, researching astral projection and spiritual vampires, and interviewing academics to explore the less rational possibilities. This sounds pretty cool, but the pacing is just too slow. And when death scenes transpire, there’s not much to them. Even when Paul’s own wife dies it is about as unexciting as this movie gets.
Let’s just spoil this movie, shall we. Some body-hopping spirits have been exchanging host bodies via astral projection over time in order to live forever. Once again, this may sound pretty cool… but it’s not. It’s boring. This all builds to a conceptually wild finale with numerous deaths that is, once again, yeah… kinda’ boring.
As far as 80s horror goes, this is perfectly competently made. Even more so than most typical teen-foddered slashers or haunted mansion movies of the era. This feels like a real movie; like more of a drama even. But just not a particularly good movie by any means. This is no hidden gem, and it has nothing particularly interesting to offer. I chose to sit through it after realizing it starred Karen Black and the director (George Mihalka; My Bloody Valentine, The Psychic) of at least one good horror movie. I may not regret the experience, and now I have checked another movie off my list of “all 80s horror movies I need to watch to see them all.” But I’m definitely not recommending this either.
Movies, Films & Flix 