Author of adventure/thriller and horror fiction

NO ONE WILL SAVE YOU (2023)

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NO ONE WILL SAVE YOU (2023) tells the story of a young man struggling to stay alive during an alien invasion. Novel for its almost non-existent dialogue and reliance on physical performance, the movie is creepy good fun, though the feels it aimed missed in my case.

Mourning her mother’s passing, Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever) otherwise lives a seemingly idyllic life in a house near a small town, taking pleasure in the living things, though it’s clear she’s grieving something far more than her recent loss, something deep in her past. We find out the town shuns her for some horrible past incident, but soon this will be the least of her problems as aliens invade. What starts as a home invasion escalates to become much more, resulting in deepening isolation and an ever-increasing struggle for survival.

The film is pretty remarkable in that there is pretty much only a single discernible line of dialogue. Otherwise, Dever carries the performance by trying to outsmart the aliens, run, or fight back any way she can. As for the aliens, they stole the show for me. As they’re fun to discover, I’ll say little about them except that there are several types, which really amped up the weirdness and threat, and as familiar as some looked from UFO lore, they definitely come across as alien and quirky.

With no dialogue and with Brynn constantly fighting to survive without any real safe place being available as a goal, the movie does sag a bit in the middle even if it doesn’t actually lag. The last act reveals why Brynn was so isolated and what she’s carried with her ever since, but while it’s well done, by then, the emotions this was supposed to generate didn’t really happen for me. Both the alien invasion and Brynn’s story tie together in an ending that felt for me kind of forced into what the director wanted more than what the story seemed to want.

These gentle criticisms aside, I liked NO ONE WILL SAVE YOU for its overall approach, creepy set-pieces, weird aliens, and overall feel. Overall, I thought it was pretty well done and worth the watch.

PREY (2022)

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I haven’t seen any of the PREDATOR movies since the original, but when I found out they were setting a new movie among Comanches in the 1790s, I had to give it a try. I’m glad I did. From the beautiful scenery to the native culture and action, PREY delivers.

The setting is the Northern Great Plains. The year is 1719. In a Comanche village, Naru, a young woman, wants to be a hunter. She is a good tracker, but she hasn’t yet been tested in a hunt, and her tribe would rather she focus on the gathering part of hunting and gathering. During her roaming, she spies a strange fire in the sky. This, we know, is the arrival of the Predator, an alien hunter visiting to test itself in its own great hunt. A good tracker with excellent powers of observation, Naru figures out a strange creature threatens them, while the Predator works its way up the food chain to finally discover a cunning and worthy adversary. Soon, it will be hunter versus hunter, and only one will walk away alive.

The movie has heart. Naru is likeable, believable, and we see her fight to prove herself being far less about her masculine-dominated tribe and more about exceeding her limitations and realizing her potential. The glimpses of Comanche life are interesting and supposed to be pretty authentic, though one could argue about when they started riding horses, whether the French would have been that far south hunting buffalo instead of trading, and whether or not women rode into battle alongside men (some say they commonly did). The Comanche would one day become a powerful empire thanks to their alliance with the horse (brought to them primarily by the Spanish), but this is early in all that, being 1719, so I took the movie’s portrayal of Comanche culture and history at its word.

The settings are also impressive–the film was shot in my adopted home of Alberta–providing a terrific backdrop for all the hunting and action. The CGI is pretty well done, and the action sequences were exciting and really well handled.

Overall, PREY is at its core a pretty simplistic sci-fi action movie, but the presentation is terrific, and I found myself quite liking this one, enough to make me utter the rare statement: “I liked that new PREDATOR movie!”

THE BEAR, Season 2

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THE BEAR (FX Original exclusively on Hulu in the US, on Disney Plus in Canada) was a surprise watch for me. I honestly fell in love with it. Season 2 was just as good, though different, with a particular hour-long episode that was one of the funniest and most heartbreaking TV episodes I’ve ever watched. This. Is. Good.

In the first season, we meet Carmine, a famous chef who takes over his deceased brother’s small Chicago restaurant and all its problems. From the gritty visuals to the deep, lovable characters to the realistic dialogue to the exciting and tense focus on what happens in the kitchen when things are humming and when things crash into disaster, it fired on every cylinder for me.

At the end of that season, Carmine comes into a surprise amount of cash from his deceased brother, which promises an end to all the restaurant’s problems. Instead, Carmine invites a whole new set of problems by interpreting the gift as a sign to create the restaurant he’d always wanted to build with his brother.

At first, I was wondering at the second season’s heavy turn toward comedy and the characters’ cuteness, a common sign of a show becoming a surprise hit and possibly struggling to find its footing with a second season. The first season comes at you like it has nothing to lose, while the second starts off with an awareness it now does. Happily, it doesn’t take long for THE BEAR to shake it off and find its groove and then raise the volume past the previous season’s high of 11.

There’s a lot of focus on the secondary characters this season, which is handled beautifully. While the renovations occur–at a frantic pace to meet their financial obligations and need to reopen quickly–many of the Beef’s staff members go off to learn new skills and level up to be able to contribute to the new Bear, which will offer fine dining. These episodes are goddamn heartwarming. Everybody gets a chance to find their best selves via a sense of owning what they do, often aided with powerful guest appearances by the likes of Will Poulter and Olivia Colman. They all contribute to the season’s overall theme that self-actualization is a journey with big gains but also a significant cost.

Then there’s the family Christmas episode, and oh wow. The less said, the better. I’ve never laughed so hard watching a human train wreck in my life. The guest stars, the dialogue, the pacing, all of it is landmark TV. And it perfectly encapsulates why all the major characters in the show are the way they are and why they have the motivations they have.

Overall, THE BEAR is fantastic. Big, big recommend. It’s a show that hits big themes, feels real without ever being boring, bakes your heart in the heartwarming moments, and fries your nerves when things go wrong. Can’t wait for Season 3.

THE BEAR, Season 1

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In THE BEAR (FX Original exclusively on Hulu in the U.S., on Disney Plus in Canada), a famous chef takes over his deceased brother’s small Chicago restaurant and all its problems. The result is one of the most affecting series I’ve ever watched.

This is a show about a new chef taking over a restaurant and trying to fix it, only to be resisted at every turn. The staff is resentful and set in its ways, the finances are a disaster, the restaurant owes money to an uncle with shady connections, and everything goes right before it all goes perfectly wrong. It’s also a show about a man trying to fix himself and understand his estranged brother and why he took his own life. In the end, he learns that maybe it’s less important to fix than to find something’s real potential.

Thematically, it’s even more than that if you want it. The joy of food and cooking, the comedy of a light moment, family, work, control, the self worth and pride of a job well done, and change, all wrapped in plenty of raw humanity.

The directing style is terrific, combining a gritty, almost cinema-verite approach with quick cutaways of images reflecting state of mind and big closeups showing urgency and emotion. In the kitchen, the pacing is particularly quick as we see the team that is a restaurant staff work together to prepare meals and react to the new boss trying to change their culture and how they work together.

When the shit hits the fan–and it does a lot in this show from interpersonal conflict to kitchen mishaps (often both at the same time)–the tension is unbelievable. Then there are plenty of moments where everything just sings, from relationships to the restaurant finding its groove. If I had to describe THE BEAR in a few words, I’d call it a story about dysfunctional family told with plenty of heart, though sometimes it feels far more like a heart attack.

Overall, I absolutely loved season 1 of this show, which in many ways felt like BOILING POINT, a great movie, stretched out in a story told with far more depth and humanity. Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I got this tense while laughing this much during almost every single episode of a TV show.

Cover Reveal for HOW TO MAKE A HORROR MOVIE AND SURVIVE

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Cover reveal for HOW TO MAKE A HORROR MOVIE AND SURVIVE, my new horror novel coming in 2024.

A slasher film director makes a horror movie with a camera that might be demonic. The scream queen he loves wants to survive the night. Together, director and Final Girl, they’re about to make movie history.

Big thanks for Lisa Pompilio for another great cover and of course to Hachette Book Group for publishing it.

RENFIELD (2023)

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RENFIELD (2023) is a terrific movie trapped inside a bad movie. I don’t know how else to put it.

In this film, Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) has been serving Dracula (Nicholas Cage) for over a century. Exhausted by constantly finding victims and fleeing vampire hunters, he brings his master to America and starts to question their relationship after a chance walk-in with a support group for emotionally dependent personalities. He gains the seed of independence and self worth and hopes to act on it, but rejecting the evil, narcissistic, and vengeful prince of darkness will be no easy thing.

What an amazing setup for a movie, truly killer high concept and fertile ground for an excellent, deep, and dark comedy. Unfortunately, it’s not explored to its full potential. Instead, we get a major plot line involving an organized crime family and a cop seeking justice for her murdered father. This rote storyline helps catalyze Renfield’s journey but dominates the film, hoping to please fans with a lot of CGI action and Monty Python levels of gore but ultimately just eating up the run time. The result is a movie with two personalities, and the dominant one is the paint-by-numbers crowd pleaser.

Nicholas Hoult and Nicholas Cage are terrific actors and always great to look at. Cage in particular transcends even his usual Cageyness to bring something zany and new but also familiar to a role that has been played many times before. Their characters’ conflict is the real gem even if it’s largely obscured by the mob/cop plot, ironically showing us a different kind of codependent relationship between telling a good story and satisfying expectations, a case study for Hollywood’s tendency to avoid complexity to please the most amount of people.

All that said, RENFIELD ain’t a bad movie. Just the opposite, I quite liked it for its better qualities. I just wished it had been lovable, as it so easily could have achieved with its terrific premise.