Film Reviews
Film Review : The Smashing Machine (2025)
Published
4 months agoon
A24 and Benny Safdie both have had some impressive runs lately so when word came out they’d be doing a biopic on the life of Mark Kerr an early Pride / UFC fighter, starring The Rock and Emily Blunt, many were intrigued. Upon a less than stellar release and reviews though it seemed to fade quickly and upon my watch I entirely see why.
Set between 1997 and 2000 we watch MMA fighter Mark Kerr, a then undefeated fighter, coming up at a time when Pride and UFC were slowly gaining traction. His rocky relationship with his girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt), leading to his first defeat, and therefore downfall alongside his best friend / coach Mark Coleman shows us the ups and downs of Kerrs career.
While it sounds quite generic, thats because honestly it is. His story is never a particularly interesting one and seemingly one that you’d think would be extremely common. He has a drug issue, aggression issues, relationship issues, and things just generally don’t work out. While they never try to shine away from the faults in his story its just never really one I felt was an enjoyable watch.
Dwayne Johnson does give possibly his most diverse role yet. While he physically looks the part easily we haven’t seen him do such a dramatic role like this before. Emily Blunt and Ryan Bader are both great in their roles as Dawn and Coleman but both also come off as somewhat lifeless and undeveloped. At times towards the end it feels like we’ve even more off of this being a story about Kerr to where he is the side character to a story about Coleman.
As expected from Benny though the fights are what shines here. Shot beautifully with jazz music building up as the fight continues on is a true highlight of the film.
Sadly though nothing else really seems to work here. The film is fine but just entirely unremarkable. While being an early star in the sport attempting to make this a major film seems to have spread out his story just too thin showing how generic his out of the octogon story really was.
Score :
2 / 5
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I’m just gonna say it, this might be horrors worst trilogy ever.
We continue with our hero Maya as she stumbles around the woods of a small town that never seems to have people, or cell phone service, until random people show up like its a known place. Maya seems to have a team of people who can pinpoint her location but also not have any bit of common sense.
Our killers here are still just stumbling idiots and the story line that this film has put in OVER THREE FILMS is all still just a jumbled mess of nothingness. By the end nothing is laid out, characters aren’t explained much, and everything is left to ‘oh well maybe killers are fun’ or something along that mix.
Not even Madelaine Petsch who tried her best to save part 2 can do much here. She feels like she phoned it in reading off cue cards. Richard Brake gets more screen time but even as a generic creepy sheriff who seemingly not only knows about the strangers but made a deal with them, can’t save this.
I hated all of this. I hated this trilogy. I hated what they tried to do. All 3 parts of this were bad in their own ways but to close it out on such a terrible film truly makes me question what they wanted from the start of this even.
Score :
0.5 / 5
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After the horrible outing of Chapter 1, The Strangers Chapter 2 dropped last year to almost no excitement. Only being released I feel because all 3 films were filmed at the same time for a small budget, Chapter 2 starts to forge its own story after Chapter One acted as mostly a remake of the original film.
We continue following Maya who after getting some severe wounds soon has to be on the run again as the masked men appear at the hospital shes at. Sadly this is the entire premise of this film. In our dead town, lifeless of anything worthy of seeing, we get to follow Maya run from room to room, location to location, in a near cartoonish manner as we get bored to tears.
Its just hard to care here really. Maya is rather paper thin character, no backstory really or anything, our masked strangers now come as typical slasher villains, and any other character is either boring giving bland dialog that will set up a twist for part 3 or are killed off.
What really starts to hurt this film though is the flashbacks. We start to get flashbacks done to give our masked villains some backstory from when they were first children. They are poorly done and overall pointless flashbacks that just show that these were deranged people.
Our standout here though both good and bad involves a scenes where Maya fights an animal. It is so over the top and dumb that with just how bland and boring these movies are it becomes the highlight of it.
Madelaine Petsch really tries her best here as Maya and deserves some praise for standing out in such a poorly wrote movie but she can’t save this.
With how part 1 and 2 are I can only imagine what dumb things may come for the final act in this unneeded trilogy.
Score :
1 / 5
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Whistle might go down as one of the years best horror films that got a wide release, with almost no push for the film ahead of time, that no one saw.
Our story follows a group of high school students who after blowing into and hearing an Aztec death whistle are killed off one by one. We have Chrys, the new girl in a small town, who finds the whistle in her locker and after hanging out with her cousin and his friends get dragged into this situation.
Sure, the plot holes start early. This small town moved on from the previous owner of her locker, who died violently in school, so quickly that they never bothered to empty his locker where the whistle was. Its also somewhat easy to look past because the premise itself here works so well. We get a Final Destination esque film here where everyone within ear shot of the whistle has death chasing them where they die in the fashion and age that was set for them from birth. This leads to some incredibly graphic and rather cool kills here where we get a solid mix of practical effects and CGI.
Our cast of high school characters are paper thin and don’t keep us rooting for them enough to really care though if they die. They set themselves apart enough though to be memorable, even if their inclusion makes no sense. Our religious nut who is also a drug dealer, main character with a troubled past who is also into the popular girl, and the guy who gets friend zoned.
Really on paper, and even writing this, so much of this film doesn’t have much going for it yet it works. Its a fun, simple, and incredibly mindless horror film that gets by with a unique enough premise to it where it can have some fun.
Score :
3.5 / 5
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The horror world taking any property they can touch and giving it the horror spin is now starting to wear thing. The Poohniverse was dumb fun, Popeye got at least one watchable film, but Wizard Of Oz : Dead Walk proves that the low budget run of these films is hitting its threshold.
We follow Dorothy who is a recovering drug addict who has been placed by her Aunt Em inside the Emerald Rehabilitation Clinic. She has constant nightmares of that she is in another land with a yellow brick road and creatures plague it. Soon though the Tin Man and Scarecrow from her nightmares are now in the real world though who are not friendly, but are killers who collect hearts and brains.
This is the first of four Oz related horror films releasing in 2026 and this one shows its low budget openly. The writing and acting is atrocious with the effects and costumes being even worse. Our Tin Man has wrinkled clothes and a bendy cheap weapon out of a Halloween store.
While the concept here could work with a budget, all the film has against it just weighs it down here. We get slogged through bad writing and acting to the point where the bad kills don’t help get past the fact that the film itself is painfully boring.
Score :
.5 / 5
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Silent Hill on paper should be an easy enough horror film to make. Great location, characters, story, and the creep factor is all there. Somehow though we are now 0-3 on good films based on the games with this years Return To Silent Hill by far being the worst entry yet.
French director Christophe Gans, who directed the 2006 Silent Hill, is back at it this time around though the films are not related at all. We follow James Sunderland, a tortured problematic artist, who after losing the love of his life appears back in Silent Hill based on a feeling that she is still alive. He attempts to piece together clues of what may have happened to his love Mary, the town, and his own life as reality starts to blur even further.
The story is the first part of this films issues though. James, once in Silent Hill, runs from spooky situation to spooky situation, with really nothing in between. The world feels empty in the worst way, nothing feels like a threat, and it all comes across as boring and lackluster. Iconic enemies make their appearance here and are quickly either dumbed down and ignored as if they aren’t a real threat.
It tries so hard too with the story to make it a convoluted plot of what may or may not be real but never seems to embrace it enough to let us in. We get hints of sub plots including the town, a cult, his love Mary and what happened, as well as his life post Mary, but the film just sort of moves on without explaining it in even a simple way.
Visually the movie is hideous too. The green screen is constant and looks beyond cheap. So many effects are just keyed in to where its clear nothing is actually around them. It doesn’t help too that our only two actors here are both acting with the enthusiasm of someone who doesn’t want to be there and hold zero chemistry together.
At 106 minutes the film slogs on. Though the ending tries its best to redeem itself, which is supposedly one of the endings of Silent Hill 2 which this game is based on, the journey there is boring and not done well enough to endure the travel there.
Score :
.5 / 5
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Don’t you just love a terrible love budget movie where really nothing in it stands out because it seems they always find their way to me.
The Vindicator follows a true crime podcast crew who has a serial killer disrupt their show as they are filming at a famous location. From there he slowly starts to go after them causing them reveal things they wish were kept hidden.
This is low budget and awfully boring. The plot never becomes interesting with the twist mainly because everyone here is so horribly unlikeable. Its a room of people who don’t get killed quick enough.
Sadly not even the kills here are worth it because there really isn’t anything noteworthy at all and really nothing till the final few minutes. You are stuck with shoddy camera work and bad acting at a slow pace instead in an attempt to build towards our climax.
Its a premise that we will likely see way more in horror and if done right, could be great. Here though it just isn’t worth it.
Score :
1 / 5
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