Heart Eyes (2025)

Christopher Landon has made a name for himself in the past few years by figuring out fun ways to blend slasher movie tropes with other sub-genres (e.g. timeloop movies, bodyswap films). He has written with Michael Kennedy before, and this time around both are joined by Phillip Murphy to deliver a film that places some bloody kill scenes in the middle of what is essentially a standard rom-com. Josh Ruben is in the director's chair, which means it's up to him to ensure that the dialogue and set-pieces are couched in something that comes close enough to that rom-com style, but can he manage to do that?

A killer is on the loose, the Heart Eyes Killer, and they're targeting couples. This has been happening for a couple of years now, every Valentine's Day, which makes it a big problem for those in a relationship. Ally McCabe (Olivia Holt) isn't in a relationship though, so she should be safe from the killer. Her biggest worry concerns trying to keep her job. In need of major guidance, and a way to overhaul her latest ad campaign that disastrously uses romantic tragedy at the heart of it, Ally ends up forced to work with Jay Simmons (Mason Gooding), a bit of a whizz drafted in to save the day. Ally and Jay need to spend some time together to brainstorm and plan, which leads to the Heart Eyes Killer viewing them as a couple, which leads to them being pursued, even as they try to explain to those around them that they really aren't a couple.

Heart Eyes works fairly well as a slasher. The pacing is decent for most of the runtime, aside from a third act that just has one or two scenes more than necessary, the kills are entertaining and bloody, and Holt and Gooding are very appealing leads. The most pleasant surprise, however, is just how well some of the rom-com moments work. There's a great meet-cute, a fun sense of external factors ensuring that our leads are destined to pair up, and stay paired up, some very fun cute klutziness that adds some non-lethal injuries to the onscreen catalogue of pain, and even the scenes of attempted murder often show a romance blossoming under unusually difficult circumstances. There are times when it tries to be too cute though, particularly when name-checking other movies and painfully winking at viewers, but nothing is bad enough to unbalance the whole thing.

Aside from Holt and Gooding, who are absolutely as enjoyable and likeable as they need to be in their roles, the cast also includes Devon Sawa and Jordana Brewster as a pair of cops named . . . Hobbs and Shaw, Gigi Zumbado as the standard protective bestie, and Michaela Watkins as a demanding boss, as well as a number of people who make enough of an impression in their first few moments to make them plausible suspects as the killing spree starts to feel a bit more personal.

Despite the lighter touch, this is still a film aimed mainly at slasher movie fans. As long as you can enjoy the strange clash of sub-genres then you will be rewarded with some laughs, some entertaining bloodshed, and a killer working with some nicely-personalised deadly accessories.

7/10

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Netflix And Chill: Time Cut (2024)

It's blindingly obvious that Netflix decided to offer up Time Cut to those who already enjoyed Totally Killer on Amazon Prime Video. Whereas that film had a young woman ending up back in the 1980s, where she may be able to stop the slasher who killed her mother, this film has a young woman ending up back in the early 2000s, where she may be able to stop the slasher who killed her sister. Do you already notice one of the big problems this might have in comparison to the film it most closely emulates? Yeah, someone time-travelling to the early 2000s just isn't as ripe for comedy as someone time-travelling to the 1980s. Although, to be fair, Time Cut isn't necessarily selling itself as a comedy. It's just a shame that it fails to sell itself as anything else, completely failing as a slasher, a sci-fi movie, and a thriller.

Madison Bailey plays Lucy Field, a high school student who feels that her life is overshadowed by the killings that devastated their town over twenty years ago, creating a wound that has never fully healed for her parents and others. Stumbling on to a time machine in a nearby hay barn, as you do, Lucy ends up back in 2003, where she meets her sister, Summer (Antonia Gentry), one of the victims of the killer all those years ago. Lucy wants to change the past, but that could also end up jeopardising her own existence. Thankfully, she has a young scientifically-minded man named Quinn (Griffin Gluck) ready to help her, but there's not too much to worry about when this time-travel movie decides to establish some rules that allow it to essentially do whatever it takes to get to the preferred ending of writers Michael Kennedy and Hannah Macpherson.

Macpherson also takes on the directing duties here, having crowd-funded some of her feature debut just over a decade ago before then spending most of her time working on shorts and TV shows (with the exception of something called Sickhouse and a film that slotted alongside others in the Into The Dark series). She may well have a lot of talent, but she's seriously hampered here by the clumsy writing from Kennedy, who also has the story credit. Kennedy likes to mix slashers with different high-concept ideas, having also written Freaky, It's A Wonderful Knife, and Heart Eyes, but I would suspect that you'd enjoy all of those films ahead of this one. Whether they succeed completely or not, they all have a stronger sense of commitment to the main concept. Time Cut feels like something made with extreme reluctance, like a school project written by teens who were keen on the whole idea when they started it, but then soon realised just how disinterested they were as they were forced to do more research and up their word count.

The sad thing is that the cast are generally very good. Bailey is a fantastic lead, making me wish I had more reason to be invested in her plight, and Gentry is absolutely fine as the potentially-doomed Summer. Gluck is enjoyable as Quinn, so good that he makes it easier to accept just how quickly he believes the wild truth as told to him by Lucy. There are others who do well, but the film works best when it shows the central trio trying to find their way to catching a killer and figuring out the butterfly effect of that. 

Sadly, there's nothing here to make it worth recommending to others. As I said in the opening paragraph, this doesn't work as a slasher, nor a sci-fi movie, nor a thriller or mystery. It's just there, disappointingly determined to make the end of the film feel strangely inconsequential, despite at least one big change to the lives of our leads. Avoid.

3/10

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Shudder Saturday: It's A Wonderful Knife (2023)

It's a fun premise, and one that many horror fans seemed to warm to as soon as the trailer dropped. What if you made It's A Wonderful Life, but had the lead character fail to realise that her non-existence would leave a killer free to continue a murder spree that she'd managed to stop one whole year ago? That's it. And you would think that was an easy way to have a lot of fun. It turns out that you need a bit more than just that great concept though.

Jane Widdop plays Winnie Carruthers, the young woman who becomes the George Bailey of this movie. Although things have been much better for her family since she dealt with a stab-happy killer the previous Christmas, she doesn't feel that anything has gone her way. Not getting into her chosen university, not having a decent boyfriend, and not even being given a thoughtful main Christmas present from her family. So she decides to wish that she'd never been born, which puts her in a strange and darker version of the town that she grew up in. A killer seems to be building up quite the bodycount, her parents don't know who she is, her brother is dead (because she wasn't there to save him), and people are just having a really bad time of things. Winnie eventually enlists the help of Bernie (Jess McLeod), a young woman ostracised by many of her peers, and she also manages to convince her cool aunt, Gale (Katharine Isabelle), of the reality of her weird circumstances. She cannot get through to her dad (Joel McHale) though, and she cannot convince enough people that the killer may be someone they see almost every single day. Meanwhile, Mayor Henry Waters (Justin Long) is reaping many benefits, and he might not want things to go back to how they were.

Director Tyler MacIntyre has a lot of fans in the horror genre, having helmed both Patchwork and Tragedy Girls in the past decade. While both of those films have flaws, they're also good enough to have marked McIntyre out as someone to keep an eye on. This film, written by Michael Kennedy (who was a co-writer on Freaky), feels like a step back. It's surprisingly unimaginative, far too tame when it comes to the kills, and doesn't feel as if it ever fully realises the potential of the premise. There's no real sense of mystery when it comes to the identity of the killer, the "butterfly effect" of Winnie's non-existence seems to run through a tiresome check-list of the most obvious negatives, and it lacks a sense of fun for most of the runtime (if you're not going to deliver bloody kills then at least make it fun).

It also doesn't help that Widdop feels like a disappointingly weak lead. I've not seen them in anything else, not that I can remember anyway, and I'm sorry to say that they don't have much screen presense, nor do they have the right way of delivering the dialogue when it is supposed to show them being emboldened and badass. McLeod is a lot better in her role, and Isabelle is always welcome onscreen, but nobody can do enough to make up for that notable mis-step in casting. Long tries his best, helped in his performance by capped teeth and mannerisms that make him as funny as he is creepy, but his energy is offset by the far-too-laid-back performance of McHale (hey, I like the guy, he doesn't work here though).

Perhaps part of my disappointment in this stems from my enthusiasm for it. I loved the concept, and the trailer did enough to win me over. I was hoping it would be a new seasonal slasher treat, despite the fact that we're definitely not short on those recently. It wasn't to be though. I hope MacIntyre finds something better for his next project, and I hope Kennedy goes back to co-writing as he hones his craft. And while I wasn't a fan of Widdop here, I am glad to have been introduced to McLeod, who seems to have built up a hefty filmography so far mostly full of shorts and TV work. I look forward to seeing her in more features in the years ahead.

The film may not be wonderful, but I can't dismiss it as awful either. It gets a bonus point for the title alone.

5/10

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Freaky (2020)

Co-written and directed by Christopher Landon, the man who gave us the enjoyable Happy Death Day movies, Freaky is a similar fun mash-up of slasher movies and something, well, very much not a slasher movie. This time around you get some body swap shenanigans with your slasher antics.

Vince Vaughn is the killer, The Butcher, and we first see him deapatching a group of teens in entertainingly varied ways. An encounter with Millie (Kathryn Newton) and a magic knife leads to a lot of confusion when the killer wakes up in Millie’s body, and Millie is suddenly confused about why she is suddenly an adult male. Can she convince her friends, Nyla and Josh, that she is not actually The Butcher. And can she stop the killer, now able to mingle with a whole school full of potential victims, from committing a bloody massacre.

The best thing about Freaky, similar to Happy Death Day, is the way in which it so successfully mixes the slasher movie moments with the high concept. You have lots of scenes that are simply fun, and both Vaughn and Newton have a blast portraying one another, but you also have some inventive, and impressive, kills. Things are so well put together that I didn’t even mind the lapses in logic.

Landon directs well, and he certainly keeps things moving briskly enough that the 101-minute runtime never drags, and the script, also worked on by Michael Kennedy, instinctively knows how to make the most of the body swap potential. It isn’t as strong elsewhere, particularly in a strand that explores Millie’s strained relationship with her mother, but it at least has the sense to minimise any time not focused on the central cat and mouse element.

Vaughn and Newton are both excellent in their roles, with the former arguably best in that silent opening sequence (why has Vaughn so rarely been used for characters with real darkness in them?) and the latter allowed to gain a cool “no fucks given” attitude as soon as she gains the soul of a killer. Celeste O’Connor is fine as Nyla, and Misha Osherovich provides a lot of laughs as Josh. Dana Drori and Katie Finneran are just fine in their roles, Drori as Millie’s sister/local Police officer and Finneran as the mother with a drinking problem, and Uriah Shelton is cute enough as the boy that Millie has a crush on.

Not AS good as the Happy Death Day movies, mainly due to the fact that the character change is instant, for obvious reasons, rather than a journey that shows real growth, this is still a great slice of funny, gory entertainment. It also has at least three superb, and memorable, death scenes. And Alan Ruck brilliantly portraying a teacher who is quite a douchebag you want to see unwittingly piss off a serial killer.

7/10

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