george.schmidt

FINAL DESTINATION: BLOODLINES (2025) **1/2 Kaitlyn Santa Juana, Teo Briones, Rya Kihlstedt, Richard Harmon, Owen Patrick Joyner, Anna Lore, Alex Zahara, April Telek, Tinpo Lee, Tony Todd, Brec Gassinger, Gabrielle Rose, Max Lloyd-Jones. The death comes with a vengeance horror franchise continues with a new wrinkle - an entire family is marked for death when a college student (Santa Juana)'s nightmares of events past with her estranged grandmother (Rose) unspools a journey of self-preservation in keeping their fates at arm's length with the trademark Rube Goldbergian grisly demises eked out with gory glee. While filmmakers Zach Lipovsky & Adam B. Stein keep things lively with a tight screenplay by Guy Busick, Lori Evans Taylor & Jon Watts, something seems amiss in making everything gel properly as past chapters have done effortlessly so. It also doesn't help when its lead suffers from George Lopez face (permanent look of surprise), so yeah. However it's a fitting coda to see Todd reprise his iconic role of Bloodworth, the wisdom spouting coroner.

CLOWN IN A CORNFIELD (2025) **1/2 Katie Douglas, Aaron Abrams, Carson MacCormac, Vincent Muller, Kevin Durand, Will Sasso, Cassandra Potenza, Verity Marks, Ayo Solanke, Alexandre Martin Deakin. Fairly decent slasher horror flick with Douglas as a recent resident of small-town whose legacy of a corn syrup factory is given a black eye when its icon Frendo The Clown goes on a murderous rampage the night of a local holiday. Checks off all the marks of the subgenera with its gleefully of the moment bloodshed and mayhem and a few well sprinkled moments of humor (teens flummoxed with a rotary phone is one for the archives). Echoes of SCREAM and I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER but not the true terror of say TERRIFIER. Horror fans will have a field day. (Dir: Eli Craig)

SINNERS (2025) ***1/2 Michael B. Jordan, Miles Caton, Andrene Ward-Hammond, Jack O'Connell, Tanaj L. Jackson, Yao, Li Jun Li, Delroy Lindo, Jayme Lawson, Hailee Steinfeld, Omar Benson Miller, Emonie Ellison, Wunmi Mosaku, Peter Dreimanis, Lola Kirke. Ryan Coogler's Depression era DeepSouth set vampire film delivers the goods with a dual performance by Jordan as criminally inclined cousins whose opening night of their juke joint unleashes a night in Hell when demonic forces prey upon its clientele. Well-crafted and strongly delivered on all accounts from production to acting giving a horror staple a much-needed transfusion of originality thru conception.