Viewer Discretion Is Advised

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.

Zombies, vampires, vengeful spirits, and AI.

RESIDENT EVIL (2026)

After spending a couple of decades building a career in comedy, Zach Cregger got a lot of positive attention and blew a lot of minds when he shifted over to horror to direct Barbarian. He had even greater success, and earned more horror cred, with his next feature, Weapons – so, of course, he found himself receiving offers to work with established properties. The one he chose to work on was Resident Evil, taking the opportunity to reboot the film franchise and make a movie inspired by a video game series that he loves. But, in doing so, he made a decision that didn’t sit well with a lot of his fellow fans: he decided to make a movie that’s set in the Resident Evil universe, but doesn’t feature any characters from the games. Because, as he says, those characters’ stories are already being told perfectly in the games.

Cregger was also drawing inspiration from Sam Raimi’s horror comedy classic Evil Dead II when crafting his Resident Evil, which he directed from a script he wrote with Shay Hatten. The movie has a heavily comedic edge, with a lot of its humor coming from the fact that it centers on a hapless fellow who’s completely unprepared to find himself in the middle of these horrific circumstances and bumbles his way through the situation. That character is medical courier Bryan, endearingly played by Austin Abrams.

Bryan has been tasked with delivering a mysterious package to Raccoon City General Hospital, a job that’s trouble enough from the start because it involves driving through a snow storm in the Rocky Mountains. Then a strange woman comes walking out in front of his car and his night really falls apart. From there, Bryan finds himself dealing with zombie-like beings, tentacle monsters, monster dogs, and other gross things. While many filmmakers would use Resident Evil as a chance to make a movie that’s primarily a zombie film, Cregger clearly wasn’t very interested in doing that, because the zombies in this movie sprout tentacles and merge with each other, something I guess happens in Resident Evil games that came along after the ones I played. (I only played the first few.)

Whether or not it should be called Resident Evil is something for the game fans to debate, but regardless of the title, I found Cregger’s movie to be very entertaining to sit through. There are a lot of amusing moments as Bryan makes his way through the crazy obstacle course Cregger dropped him into. This is a really fun horror comedy that my girlfriend and I enjoyed watching right up until the ending... where we found that Cregger completely dropped the ball, delivering one of the most irritating, unsatisfying endings imaginable.

Resident Evil is so much fun for so much of its running time, it’s a shame that the ending sucks.

THE AWAKENING (2026)

There’s a sad story behind The Awakening. The supernatural horror film was conceived, written, and originally directed by the late Jaime Osorio Márquez, who passed away in December of 2021 at the age of 46, following a long battle with kidney cancer. The Awakening wasn’t quite finished at the time of his death, so his longtime collaborator and producer Federico Durán, along with fellow filmmaker José Luis Rugeles, helped bring the project across the finish line, working alongside the original creative team to preserve Márquez’s vision. The film is a companion piece to the 2021 Colombian action horror series Thousand Fangs, which Márquez co-created with Guillermo Escalona. Originally conceived as a feature film, the project evolved into the television series during development. After Márquez’s death, his collaborators revisited the existing footage and reconstructed it into the feature film he had envisioned.

I haven’t seen the Thousand Fangs version of the story, but I, unfortunately, can’t say I enjoyed The Awakening very much at all.

The film gets off to a good start: an elite military unit is sent on a mission into the South American jungle to locate and “neutralize” a man named Matias before he can organize a militia. It’s all very reminiscent of Predator as we watch the unit assemble, get dropped off in the jungle, and make their way through the foliage to spy on an enemy encampment. They spot a man they believe to be Matias. They get authorization to neutralize him. A shot is taken… and almost as soon as the bullet hits its mark, the jungle around them bursts into horrifying life. Monstrous creatures start picking the soldiers off – but don’t expect to see a lot of those creatures, because they’re usually kept off screen or hidden in shadows, so we just see soldiers being yanked up into the trees, dragged into burrows, or pulled along the ground, into the darkness.

This sounds exciting, but the strange thing about The Awakening is the fact that – for me, at least – it completely falls apart once the supernatural threat kicks in. The initial attack primarily consists of shots of soldiers desperately firing into the darkness, which isn’t nearly as interesting as the movie seems to think it is. The survivors seek shelter in a cave… and we’re in for a long, slow, slog through the darkness from that point on. Nothing particularly interesting happens with these characters until near the end of the film.

Dragging the story down even further are flashbacks to 1542, when invading conquerors trespassed and profaned this land, awakening the rage of a supernatural guardian called Mobuya. It’s this same guardian that’s causing trouble for the soldiers in present day. The 1542 part of the story doesn’t do anything to liven things up, it’s just another part of the slog, along with childhood flashbacks that also get dropped into the mix.

The Awakening certainly has some interesting ideas in it and it has a promising set-up, as I was all-in for the idea of a Colombian twist on the Predator set-up. The puzzle pieces just don’t fit together to make this movie nearly as exciting as it should have been. After the soldiers get authorized to take that shot at Matias, the movie sputters out and becomes shockingly dull. Maybe it feels so clunky because it was assembled from a larger idea, but I can’t imagine seven episodes of Thousand Fangs could have been more interesting than this. The Awakening is already difficult to get through at 96 minutes; I don’t know how a multi-episode version of the concept could be more tolerable.

This was a rough one for me. I couldn’t wait for it to be over. But, if the basic idea sounds intriguing to you, give The Awakening a chance and see if its vision of soldiers (and conquerors) vs. supernatural creatures works better for you than it did for me.

The review of The Awakening originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com

THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD: AFTERMATH (2026)

It’s amazing how messy the rights situations behind many classic horror movies have become in recent years. Friday the 13th was bogged down in a copyright lawsuit between the screenwriter and the producer/director for several years. The screenwriters of Tremors recently got their copyright back, stopping Universal from continuing to make sequels without their involvement. Wes Craven’s estate holds the domestic rights to A Nightmare on Elm Street, while Warner Bros. retained international rights. Lately, there has been a battle over the rights to make a follow-up to The Return of the Living Dead, with a filmmaker named Steve Wolsh intending to make a sequel that’s set in the ‘80s, at Christmastime, and has Devon Sawa in the cast, while actors from the original film were teaming up with filmmaker Richard Driscoll for a musical spin-off project called Trash’s Revenge. 

Recently, the ROTLD actors won a lawsuit that would reportedly block Wolsh from being able to make his movie... but that triumph has quickly been followed by devastation, as a move made by Driscoll has left them regretting their association with him.

Shortly before Halloween, Driscoll announced that he had written and directed a movie called The Return of the Living Dead: Aftermath, which he released through his own website, DragonFlix. The actors, primarily Linnea Quigley and Beverly Randolph, were surprised to see this announcement. They had been working with Driscoll on Trash’s Revenge, but didn’t know what Aftermath was.

As it turns out, Aftermath is an 80-minute movie that was created with AI; specifically, the Seedance toolkit. It does include some footage that was shot for Trash’s Revenge (after it was run through the AI program), but for the most part it was completely generated by AI – and the process didn’t work at all. The fact that it’s an AI movie is enough to get a lot of fans to write the movie off immediately, but to add insult to injury, Driscoll doesn’t appear to have put any thought or care into the project. There doesn’t seem to have been any attempt to smooth out any rough edges. The film is full of glitches and mistakes, making it look like one of the all-time sloppiest cases of a thrown-together cash-in.

The story, such as it is, takes us back to the night of July 3, 1984, the night when the events of The Return of the Living Dead played out. The opening scene, set in modern day, introduces us to Derek Lindhurst, head of archives at the KBC Public Access TV station in Kentucky, who is sharing the footage that he has assembled over the years. The original KBC  transmission from the night of July 3, 1984 is mixed together with acquired tapes, recovered feeds, field recordings, internal government transmissions, and behind-the-scenes footage in an effort to give us deeper insight into what happened back in ‘84. While the movie showed us the zombie outbreak from the perspective of a handful of characters who were stuck in the middle of the mess, the idea here is that we’re seeing the outbreak from various other perspectives. It could have been interesting, if it weren’t so scattershot and nonsensical.

There is no consistency here – not with The Return of the Living Dead, since the rules of its zombies don’t always match with the rules established in the original movie, and not even from scene to scene in this movie. The story is supposed to be taking place in 1984, and yet there are scenes with modern technology on display. There are people carrying digital cameras and recording podcasts. It’s insulting how lazy all of this is, and it wears out any welcome it had within minutes.

The most entertaining sequence in the movie involves the return of the characters Chuck and Spider from the original film, and that sequence doesn’t last long. 

Beverly Randolph is encouraging fans who contributed to the Trash’s Revenge crowdfunding campaign and even those who paid to rent Aftermath from DragonFlix to look into getting a refund. I feel sorry for the actors who got bamboozled here, signing on for one project and ending up in something different. The only bright side here is that the Return of the Living Dead sequels that were previously regarded as the worst films in the franchise now look a whole lot better in comparison to Aftermath.

HABIT (1995)

In 1981, filmmaker Larry Fessenden made an 18 minute short film called Habit, which was about a man named Sam, who has just lost his father and broken up with his girlfriend. “Drunk and neglected, he finds solace in a strange woman, Anna, a mysterious vampire who draws him into a world of madness and murder.” Fourteen years later, Fessenden returned to the concept with a feature film also called Habit, which stretches the story out from 18 minutes to a 113 minute running time. I haven’t seen the short version, but the feature version didn’t really need to be nearly as long as it is.

Fessenden plays Sam, an alcoholic fellow who’s so self-destructive that he describes himself as “committing suicide on the installment plan.” While attending a costume party on Halloween, he crosses paths with a mysterious woman named Anna (Meredith Snaider) and instantly becomes smitten. Over the next several weeks, Sam and Anna pursue a relationship... but by Thanksgiving, Sam feels like he’s falling apart. His health is failing, and he comes to suspect that it’s because Anna is a vampire who has been feeding on him ever since they first got together.

That’s a fine set-up for a vampire horror movie, but most of the time Habit seems more interested in being a slice-of-life study of a troubled man living in New York City. There’s not a whole lot going on in the movie, aside from Sam expressing complicated feelings about his absentee father, drinking himself into a stupor, falling for Anna, and occasionally interacting with his ex (Heather Woodbury) or his friends (played by Aaron Beall, Patricia Coleman, and Jesse Hartman). The core of the story is interesting, but the execution is probably only going to work for people with a fondness for low-budget filmmaking.

In that regard, Habit was an impressive accomplishment for Fessenden, who shot the movie over the course of three months on a budget of $60,000.