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I’m an Ohio native, and growing up I also lived in Florida for a short time before graduating from Ohio State (sorry…but still Big Ten, right?) My wife Hope and I have one son (he’s in L.A. trying to be a star) and together we are Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critics on our website www.maddwolf.com.
I’m a very blessed cancer survivor, and have been privileged to work in radio since I was 16. I’m a big sports fan, and I also enjoy fitness, my Harley, scuba diving, fishing, and of course…music! Glad to be here!
What a week for arachnophobes! Spiders got you coming and going this week, and if you’re looking to escape those, maybe don’t try the ocean. Whales! And if that’s not terrifying enough, patriarchy and oppressive class systems make swooning a necessity in the new Jane Austen adaptation. The good news, it’s all pretty good!
Reviews courtesy of maddwolf.com
Whalefall
In theaters
by Hope Madden
Austin Abrams is having quite a year. First, he battled mutants all over Raccoon City (Resident Evil), and now the poor guy gets swallowed whole by a sperm whale! Dude cannot catch a break!
Whalefall director Brian Duffield, who adapts Daniel Kraus’s book, traps you in there with him and for an hour and 46 minutes, you both struggle with Josh Brolin’s memory, an undigested octopus, time, and digestive fluids as Jay (Abrams) fights to survive.
Brolin is Mitt Gardiner: scuba enthusiast, tourist whale watching boat captain, and Jay’s combative father. Remember how fun it was to watch the two of them fight in Weapons? Well, this is not like that. The sparring Jay and his dad do, and the regret and resentment left behind, echoes loudly through Jay’s entire ordeal.
Were there no underlying metaphor, no larger concept fueling Jay’s fight for survival—no reason to cut away from that pulsating pool of goo now and again—Whalefall would have been little more than a pretty gross survival tale. It is as much a story of surviving grief as surviving the whale. Those daddy issues are a little heavy handed and sappy, sure, but still, you’ve never seen anything like Whalefall.
Editing, creature design, set design, and sound design coalesce to heighten tensions and convince you that you’re surrounded by innards. Crushing, moving, opening, closing, unpredictable innards. Duffield plays with the most primal of fears, and somehow, he and his team have crafted an environment that convinces.
Terrifying, claustrophobic, squishy, and primal, the anxiety Duffield creates is extraordinary. Is it realistic? How the hell do I know? But the filmmaker is committed and confident, and he’s found the perfect hero.
There is just something deeply likeable about Abrams. Whether he’s the laid-back smack head in Weapons or the arrested post-adolescent in Resident Evil, Abrams’s performances are earnest. There’s truth to them, as well as humor. For Whalefall, less humor and more earnestness. In many ways, that’s why the film succeeds. It is unabashedly sincere, and Abrams carries that off perfectly.
Grade: B+
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rN9F6-tbySY
Sense and Sensibility
In theaters
by Hope Madden
Has it really been 31 years since Emma Thompson and Ang Lee beguiled us with Jane Austen’s iconic tale of love, sisterhood, and the crushing effects of patriarchy in Georgian England?
Georgia Oakley (Blue Jean) helms the latest look inside the Dashwood family. Level headed Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and her free spirited sister Marianne (Esmé Creed-Miles) face perils of heart and home after their father’s death leaves them, their mother (Caitriona Balfe, Belfast) and younger sister (Bodhi Rae Breathnach, Shelter) facing homelessness as the estate passes to the sisters’ dullard half-brother and his greedy wife.
Class, the economic powerlessness of women, love, and sisterhood are among Austen’s most cherished themes, and every adaptation of each of her novels chooses its primary target. Usually, it’s love. But for Oakley and screenwriter Diana Reid, Sense and Sensibility is about sisterhood.
That hardly means that the quiet aching between Elinor and Mr. Ferrars (George MacKay, ideal) goes ignored. Or that Marianne’s passions for the rogue Willoughby (Frank Dillane) don’t throw the Dashwoods into a chaos of emotion. The new Sense and Sensibility is perfectly swoony in those important ways.
But Reid’s adaptation streamlines tangential characters to draw focus, and Oakley’s attention is paid to the effect love, passion, worry, and dependence has on Elinor and Marianne. Their relationship anchors the film and colors the rest of the tale with a sense of hope and struggle for agency that reminds you how timeless Austen can be.
Oakley also lets the girls’ hair down. The Dashwood women are less cinched and coiffured this go-round. Marianne, in particular, prefers her hair loose. It makes her connection to the wilds more vivid, but this earthiness carries over to the story as a whole. The Dashwoods are far easier to connect to as they do their own laundry and then stain their dresses eating wild berries.
The bones of Austen’s story are absolutely intact, but Reid and Oakley amplify interactions that may mean more to a modern audience than those attended to in previous interpretations, big screen and small.
Grade: B+
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcrwcvad84U
Crawlers
In theaters
by Hope Madden
Is Crawlers the best arachnid horror movie ever made? No. It’s not the best arachnid horror movie made in the last couple of years. Did I nearly scratch myself raw watching it, certain I had spiders crawling on me? And did I have a nightmare later that I was looting a shoe store trying to find tie-up boots for my son to protect him from the spider invasion?
Yes, to both.
So, obviously director Ángel Gómez Hernández was doing something right as he traps us for 90 minutes in a quarantined 4-floor LA apartment building very recently overrun with spiders. Not just any spiders. Spiders that, as clarified by the opening title cards, have decided to eat people.
Decided. They decided this. But you know what? Writer Jayson Rothwell’s lack of imagination here frees us up to spend more time where we want to spend it. And if you’ve chosen to see a movie where an apartment building full of tenants is trapped inside with thousands of killer spiders, my guess is that you want to see some nasty spider business. Crawlers has it.
Matilda Lutz (Revenge) is Serena, the put-upon would-be musician/building super, who finds the first body. It looks bad, so the police put the building on lockdown until they can figure out what kind of virus took out George (Chris Rogers). And then once they realize it was no virus, they drape the building so nothing goes in or out, just as Serena’s neighbors are starting to see evidence of the infestation.
It’s a great way to build tension. And we’ve spent just enough time with the tenants to root for some to survive, and root for others to get into that elevator. And the film’s CGI is believable enough that I was forever scratching and swatting in my seat.
There’s little underneath the basic story, so you’ll have to make do with surface level tension and character development. For more visual panache, check out Kia Roache-Turner’s 2024 terror Sting, and for more visceral scares with character, Sébastien Vanicek’s Infested makes every move Crawlers makes and does it better.
But those movies are not on the big screen right now, and if you want to be in a dark room full of skittering, hungry spiders, Crawlers delivers the creeps.
Grade: B
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DowjB87tRE
Don’t Move
On VOD
by Rachel Willis
The first scene of director Maclain Nelson’s film Don’t Move is the kind of opening that one will either find brutally traumatizing or emotionally manipulative. Or perhaps a little of both. Either way, it starts with a bang.
Things slow down a bit as we spend time with Megan (Lyndsy Fonseca) while she processes the events of the opening scene. She’s persuaded to take a long-weekend camping trip with Pastor Rizzo (Tom Cavanagh) and a half-a-dozen others.
It’s surprisingly easy to find the cast endearing rather than irritating. Even though two macho dudes (Joseph Lee Anderson and Ricky Vargas) threaten to derail the peace Megan seeks while camping, their back-and-forth jabs are delivered with such flair, you’re entertained rather than annoyed.
The film moves slowly toward the inexorable confrontation between man and… something in the woods as our camping group settles in. The acting among the many cast members remains top notch, and a touching relationship builds between Paster Rizzo and his daughter Emma (Hunter King). This could have devolved into a stereotypical “daughter hates and resents overbearing father,” but instead their relationship is more believable. It’s not perfect, but it’s sweet.
Once the action picks up, things get interesting. Jump scares are few, which makes them even more effective. The cast continues to work well together, so even as their situation deteriorates, we want them to succeed in overcoming the monster in the woods. It’s unfortunate that one of the strongest cast members (Vargas) is saddled with exceedingly cliché one-liners. The movie would have worked so much better if the character had been more original.
Of course, one of the hallmarks of any movie with a cast greater than five is that characters often rely on tropes to let us get to know them. Success here relies on the strength of the actors. In this case, they more than meet the challenge of differentiating themselves.
The cast and good special effects help create a film that’s a cut above similar fare.
Grade: B+
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfx3MjMV6x4
Hallowarrior
On Shudder
by Hope Madden
It’s hard not to root for Milly Shapiro to survive a horror movie. In writer/director Ben Sottak’s Hallowarrior, we see Shapiro as desperately lonely teen Pumpkin. Pumpkin’s been alone—truly alone—for four Halloweens now, since some kind of plague swept through and claimed everybody else, as far as she can tell.
So, this Halloween was going to be her last. She put out decorations, lit candles, watched the old home movie where she carved pumpkins with her family, and prepared. But then, a noise on the front porch. And suddenly, Pumpkin’s wish for a family comes true.
It’s a Halloween miracle!
Pumpkin may not have seen as many post-apocalyptic movies as some of us, which would explain a lot. Royce (AJ Bowen) only contains his hostility when he notices the piece Milly’s packing. Thalia (Shannyn Sossamon) seems more nurturing and understanding but angry young Wendy (Ajani Russell) wants to shake some sense into Pumpkin.
And these three are the nice ones.
Sossamon is particularly effective, languidly menacing and just convincing enough as a maternal figure to convince a lonely kid.
Shapiro succeeds as that lonesome, naïve Pumpkin. Her innocence is frustrating but never forced. Pumpkin’s awkward, needy chemistry with Wendy likewise carries an authenticity that helps the film overcome some of its shortcomings in pacing.
Once “Wax and the boys” come calling, Hallowarrior should be hitting its groove, but we get so little in the way of character or story development, the film doesn’t develop the kind of dread it could. Though the stakes are as high as they could be, you don’t feel it.
Still, each of the new guests is creepy in their own way and there are a couple of impressive (and one incomprehensible) kills.
We’ve seen the end of the world from a lot of perspectives. Pumpkin’s is different, and thanks in large part to Shapiro’s performance, Hallowarrior is a fine addition to the end of times canon.
Grade: B-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORjn6ox53_U
