No New Ideas

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

Sequels, a reboot, and a remake.

ANACONDA (2025)

Around five years ago, Sony’s Columbia Pictures announced that they were developing a reboot / reimagining of the 1997 “nature run amok” thriller Anaconda with the intention of “taking what was a simple and relatively cheap programmer with a B-movie concept and event-izing it in scope and budget.” As a fan of Anaconda, I was on board for the start – but when I read that announcement, I never would have imagined that “event-izing” the concept would involve making a meta comedy that stars two of my favorite actors, but that’s exactly what writer/director Tom Gormican and his co-writer Kevin Etten delivered... and I’m really glad they did.

Jack Black plays Doug McCallister, who had childhood dreams of becoming a filmmaker, but has ended up working as a wedding videographer in his hometown instead. He was supposed to follow his friend Ronald "Griff" Griffen Jr. (Paul Rudd) out to Hollywood, but never did. The whole Hollywood thing hasn’t gone well for Griff anyway, as he’s having trouble getting and keeping jobs as a background actor. But then, Griff comes back home with some cool news: he has managed to acquire the rights to reboot Anaconda, a movie Doug, Griff, and their friends – Thandiwe Newton as newly divorced lawyer Claire Simons and Steve Zahn as alcoholic pill-popper Kenny Trent – enjoyed watching together in their younger days. Griff convinces Doug, Claire, and Kenny to team up with him on an indie take on Anaconda. They gather some meager funds and head off to shoot the movie in the Brazilian Amazon.

Since their movie is low budget, they’ll need to use a real snake for the snake attack scenes, so they hire oddball snake wrangler Santiago Braga (Selton Mello) and his pet anaconda to join them on their riverboat, which is being piloted by a mysterious woman named Ana Almedia (Daniela Melchior). They’re not aware that Ana is in some kind of trouble, being tracked by gun-wielding men, and actually stole this boat from its captain.

I felt that the early scenes that set everything up were a bit of a bumpy ride, but once our American filmmakers arrived in Brazil and met Santiago, the movie came alive and the jokes really started landing for me. Jack Black and Paul Rudd are two of my favorite actors and they both, Black especially, have made me laugh a lot over the years, so I was surprised to find that Selton Mello actually managed to be the funniest actor in the cast. He made Santiago a hilarious person to watch.

Zahn also has a great comedic moment later in the film... and so does a wild boar that gets paired with Black for one of the best scenes.

This Anaconda is primarily focused on comedy. If you turn to this one looking for snake attack thrills, you’re probably going to be disappointed. While there is a massive snake lurking around the Amazon and eating people (Santiago’s snake is not the villain here), there’s nothing scary about the snake sequences. They’re often over-the-top ridiculous. But this was just fine to me because I was enjoying the comedy.

This isn’t the sort of Anaconda movie I ever expected to exist, but I found it to be really entertaining, and it easily became my second favorite movie in the Anaconda franchise, following the original.

BLACK PHONE 2 (2025)

I thought director Scott Derrickson’s film adaptation of the Joe Hill short story The Black Phone would be a standalone, one-and-done horror movie, and so did Derrickson. With their script, he and his writing partner C. Robert Cargill had told a complete, expanded version of Hill’s 30-page-or-so story. The film shows what happens when a young boy named Finney is abducted by a serial killer known as The Grabber, who holds children captive in his soundproofed basement before eventually killing them. There’s a black phone mounted on the wall of this basement cell, a phone that has been out of service for a long time... but while the kid is there, the phone rings. On the other end of the line are the spirits of the killer’s previous victims, who give the kid hints on how to escape and, in the end, even kill The Grabber. The end. 

But then, Hill gave Derrickson a simple sequel pitch: “A phone rings, Finney answers, and it’s The Grabber calling from Hell.” In that moment, Derrickson realized he needed to make a sequel. He and Cargill took that pitch and ran with it. And that’s how we got Black Phone 2, which turns The Grabber into a supernatural entity that’s somewhat reminiscent of Freddy Krueger.

Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw reprise the roles of Finney and his somewhat psychic younger sister Gwen. In 1982, four years after the events of the first movie, Gwen starts having nightmares about murders that took place at Alpine Lake Camp in the Colorado Rockies back when their (also somewhat psychic) late mother was a counselor there in 1957. To get to the bottom of what’s going on, Gwen convinces Finney and her friend Ernesto (Miguel Mora, playing the younger brother of his deceased character from the first movie) to go to Alpine Lake Camp with her.

They arrive just in time for a blizzard to shut the whole area down. Along with camp supervisor Armando (Demián Bichir), Armando’s niece Mustang (Arianna Rivas), and religious couple Barbara and Kenneth (Maev Beaty and Graham Abbey), they are the only living people at the camp... but the spirits of children who were murdered there 25 years earlier are still lingering there, and so is The Grabber, who committed those murderers.

I never expected Ethan Hawke is pursue the idea of becoming a genre icon, but here he is, reprising the role of The Grabber in pure disfigured supernatural monster form. The Grabber has spent the last four years suffering in an icy Hell, and he’s out for revenge. The evil spirit of the dead killer can only be seen by his young, intended victims, and there are some intense scenes of him tormenting people, particularly Gwen. But there are also some moments that I felt were too goofy, where we see him skating and flipping around on a frozen lake while attacking people.

The skating moments were directly inspired by a skating scene from an ‘80s slasher Curtains, but the scene in that movie was effective because it didn’t take up too much screen time. A quick homage in Black Phone 2 could have worked, but Derrickson had The Grabber skating around way too long for my taste.

I was really impressed by The Black Phone. I wasn’t nearly as impressed by this sequel, but I had a good time watching it. The actors gave excellent performances in the first movie and returned to give strong performances in the follow-up, although Madeleine McGraw was let down by the script now and then when Derrickson and Cargill were having too much fun coming up with overwritten vulgarities for her to try to say. It's just impossible to make some of those lines sound natural.

Although it was a step down from its predecessor, there were some interesting ideas in Black Phone 2 and some cool moments. 

M3GAN 2.0 (2025)

Director Gerard Johnstone and the producers at Blumhouse and Atomic Monster got high on their own supply and took the wrong lessons from the success of their 2022 sci-fi horror film M3GAN. Moviegoers enjoyed M3GAN because the title character, an AI-powered doll that becomes obsessed with the child it was given to and turns homicidal, came off like a sassy, dancing female alternative to the popular killer doll Chucky. If the filmmakers had gone ahead with a sequel that remained in horror territory and delivered more crazy killer doll action, the audience might have come back for more and they could have continued to build M3GAN up to “new icon” status. Instead, they were convinced that they had already created an icon that moviegoers would come back to see more of, no matter what the tone of the movie was. So they switched genres, dropping that dangerous little doll into a sci-fi action story with a heavy dose of comedy, with the finished film coming off like a later Fast & Furious sequel.

The story, scripted by Johnstone from a story he crafted with original M3GAN writer Akela Cooper, begins with a military android called AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno) going rogue and seeking to find the motherboard to an AI machine that went wild in 1984 and has been building its knowledge ever since. If AMELIA gets her hands on the motherboard, it could be an apocalyptic scenario – so M3GAN, whose mind still exists online, reaches out to the people she tormented in the first place, scientist Gemma (Allison Williams) and her niece Cady (Violet McGraw) and offers to help them avert the end of the world in exchange for getting a replacement body.

They take the deal and, with the assistance of Gemma’s co-workers Cole (Brian Jordan Alvarez) and Tess (Jen Van Epps), set out to stop AMELIA. This involves interactions with Jemaine Clement as a billionaire who has given himself cyber enhancements and Aristotle Athari as a cybersecurity expert, as well as trips to a party, an underground bunker, a tech conference, and the hi-tech lair where the motherboard was hidden away.

M3GAN redeems herself and makes friends with the people she nearly killed last time around, then participates in ridiculous, over-the-top action sequences that never should have been included in a M3GAN movie. Some of the settings and action scenes even reminded me of Blade II!

It should have been obvious all along that this was the wrong direction for the franchise, but it didn’t become clear to the filmmakers until the movie sputtered out at the box office, making just $39.1 million compared to the first movie’s $182 million.

M3GAN 2.0 is entertaining at times, but its biggest draw is the curiosity factor of getting to witness a shockingly wrongheaded sequel.

THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE (2025)

When I revisited the 1992 psychological thriller The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, which was directed by Curtis Hanson from a script by Amanda Silver, I was surprised to see that the story of the scheming, homicidal nanny was not approach as a mystery in any way. By the time the evil nanny infiltrates the home of the protagonist family, we know exactly why she’s doing what she’s doing. So when I watched the recently released remake, directed by Michelle Garza Cervera from a script by Micah Bloomberg, I wasn’t surprised at all to see that they made it a mystery this time around. 

Mary Elizabeth Winstead stars as Caitlyn Morales, an attorney who has just given birth to her second child with Raúl Castillo’s Miguel Morales, who is one of the lamest, most worthless movie husbands who could ever hope not to see in a movie like this. Before she went into labor, Caitlyn had been assigned to represent a young woman named Polly Murphy, played by genre regular Maika Monroe, in a case against her landlord. With Caitlyn off the case, Polly let it slide and was evicted – so when the women cross paths again, Caitlyn offers Polly a job working for the Morales family as a nanny, which will also allow her to live in their guesthouse.

Polly immediately starts messing with the family in secret. She spikes their food and makes them sick, breaks rules the parents had in place for the children, and replaces Caitlyn’s meds with meth, so she comes off as a paranoid mess when she starts recognizing that Polly is doing something shady in her household.

Cervera and Bloomberg reimagined The Hand That Rocks the Cradle from the ground up, so the only thing the two movies share other than a title is the set-up of a questionable nanny causing trouble in a family’s home. They even give everything a sexuality twist; you usually expect the evil nanny to try to seduce the husband in movies like this, and that did happen in the original movie, where the husband was too good of a guy to give in. There is an aspect of Polly trying to take over the family here, but it comes along with a lesbian element. Polly is a lesbian, Caitlyn is bisexual and used to be in relationships with women, and she seems to have some degree of attraction to Polly – so much that there’s even a scene where she wanders over to the guesthouse and spies on Polly while she’s being intimate with her girlfriend. Polly also inspires Caitlyn’s ten-year-old daughter to come out as a lesbian.

Of course, all of Polly’s schemes are building up to physical violence, and there’s a deadly ending that most viewers will probably see coming a mile away. Caitlyn also enlists the help of her friend Stewart (Martin Starr) while she’s investigating Polly, and that doesn’t go well for him.

This new take on The Hand That Rocks the Cradle doesn’t even come close to reaching the level of the masterful original, but it’s an okay thriller in its own right. It’s probably not something I’ll ever feel like watching again, but it was a fine way to spend 105 minutes on one occasion.