We’ve got some good stuff for you this time around! A mix of new and old this time, starting with “Row” and “Osiris” from 2025. Back in 2016, we met some cannibals in “Raw.” Lastly, we’ll watch “Hellraiser: Judgment” from 2016 and “Terror of Mechagodzilla” from way back in 1975.
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Mainstream Films:
2025 Row
Directed by: Matthew Lasasso
Written by: Matthew Lasasso, Nick Skaugen
Stars: Sophia Skelton, Bella Dayne, Akshay Khanna
Run Time: 1 Hour, 58 Minutes
Trailer:
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
An expedition on a pretty small four person rowboat is meant to set a world record going across the Atlantic Ocean. We get to cheat a little and see the ending of the expedition first, then we go back and gradually see what led up to that ending. In the claustrophobic setting, things get worse and worse as things go wrong and the quartet starts turning on each other. It’s very well crafted, tense, and fascinating. We both really liked it.
Spoilery Synopsis
We open on a deserted-looking boat with bloodstains and wreckage everywhere. One woman is alive, clearly in shock, and there are two dead people on the deck. Credits roll.
Megan wakes up in bed, delirious, with an older man and woman there. Apparently she and the boat washed up with her the only survivor.
We cut to Newfoundland, Canada, as Daniel records his warnings and expectations about their upcoming expedition. Their four-person team plans to cross the Atlantic in a small boat, but they’re going to row all the way. Megan is going along, leaving her mother, who has terminal cancer.
Megan arrives at The Valiant and meets Mike, a new guy. Daniel and Lexi are there as well, and the four start rowing. We cut back and forth between Megan in her recovery bed and the early stages of the row. The hospital man says he’s a policeman DCI MacKelly and she’s been there for two weeks; she’s suffering from malnutrition.
On the boat, they’ve been preparing for this 28-day journey for the past two years. They’re off course, so Mike has to dive under the boat to see if something’s wrong. There’s a rubber hair band jammed in the rudder, and it’s burned out their steering motor. Daniel thinks it wasn’t an accident. The only one who was alone with the boat was Mike, but why would he do it? Mike was a replacement for Adam, who broke his leg at the last minute. Daniel insists they should push through and keep going.
On board the boat, Mike gets sick, throws up, and then gets the shivering, hallucinating kind of fever. The boat barely survives a storm and a huge wave. Megan gets an incoming satellite call from Adam, who also recently broke up with Lexi; she’s the other woman on board. Mike deliriously threatens Daniel with a knife for hiding Rachel on the boat, which is obviously not true. Daniel whacks him over the head, knocking him out.
DCI MacKelly, in the hospital, says there’s no record of anyone named Mike having anything to do with the expedition. In fact, a search by his first and last name doesn’t turn up anyone with that name existing at all.
On the boat, in the morning, Mike recovers and feels fine, but everyone else is surprisingly quiet. We get a flashback and see that Megan was the other woman in the Adam-Lexi romance. We see that Daniel is trying to call his father to dig up more information about Mike.
A wave hits and capsizes the boat; everyone goes in the water. Megan gets knocked out and nearly drowns, but everyone ends up OK except the boat’s battery, which is dead. Daniel thinks its because Mike didn’t latch the waterproof cover properly.
Somehow, they’re also short on food, which shouldn’t be possible. They only have nine days of rations left, and Lexi blames Daniel for throwing it all out. He ends up admitting it, but that may be just out of rage and not something he actually did. Mike jokes that they could throw Daniel overboard and no one would ever know. Lexi seriously considers it, but Megan is appalled at the idea.
The next day, all the water pouches are empty. That’s even worse than losing the food. Daniel again gets the blame, but he swears it had to be Mike. Mike and Lexi attack Daniel, tie him up, but Lexi bangs her head badly. She’s not dead but knocked out. Daniel says Mike killed his own girlfriend, Rachel, and is on the run from the police.
Megan has Daniel and Mike row toward a shipping lane– at knifepoint. Day 28 arrives, and they lose out on the World Record. Daniel tells mostly-unconscious Lexi all his personal problems.
Next thing we see, Lexi is dead. There’s another big wave, and Megan goes overboard again. When she gets back on, she considers cutting Daniel’s safety line loose and then just disconnects it. The current soon carries him away. She then helps Mike back on board.
Out of water and food, Megan and Mike keep on rowing. Mike tells her what happened to Rachel, who simply went missing. She admits to him that she unhooked Daniel and watched him die. He, in turn, admits that he did kill Rachel; he stabbed her during an argument. The boat rocks, and she stabs him completely by accident, a bad wound but not fatal.
At the hospital, Megan hears that one of the young men from the voyage has been recovered and will be here soon. There is tension as we wonder who it is, and they take their time showing us.
Back on the boat, they’re both starving. Mike catches a fish, but the exertion on his wounds makes him fall overboard. Megan eats the fish raw. The next day, the boat crashes at an island. She’s found not long after.
Megan in the now watches as a boat approaches the island and gets out of bed. She goes downstairs to see who it is that the police are bringing in. DCI MacKelly says he’s still got to ask the man some questions, but he doesn’t say who it is. He handcuffs Megan to the bed and mentions that they found Lexi’s body with a fatal wound to her head.
MacKelly brings the man upstairs, and it’s only Adam, broken leg and all. He doesn’t know anything about the voyage, and Megan tries to conceal her relief. Adam says the police aren’t buying her story - apparently they have found bodies. When they are alone, Adam admits that he was the one who sabotaged their rudder and food supply and water packets so that they would turn back. He didn’t plan on Daniel being so stubborn. He sticks to the story that Mike never existed and that Megan’s just insane. Mike really was on the run from killing his girl, using a false name to hide. Adam tells the cops that when he waved the boat off, there were only three people on board.
DCI MacKelly arrests Megan for two murders, Lexi and Daniel. He doesn’t believe “Mike” existed. Adam limps back outside, the real villain of the story.
Brian’s Commentary
I was immediately reminded of “The Sound” (2025), another film about a sporting activity that the filmmakers took very seriously and crammed in a little horror at the end. I found the boating stuff more interesting than the mountain climbing in the other film, but that’s not really what we signed up for. It’s clear that this one was also shooting for realism, and it succeeded there. The whole thing is fairly realistic in the way it plays out, even the way all four or five main characters interact.
The four main actors all do well, and by switching between the boat and the hospital, it doesn’t get too monotonous, which it would have if it had all been on the boat. I guessed who it was coming to the island to confront Megan fairly early, but didn’t see his reveal coming.
We both liked this one quite a bit!
Kevin’s Commentary
I thought this was gripping. And it was well done going with the flashing back and forth between the past and the present. Going into it, I was fearing tedium a little, given that it’s almost two hours long, but I was fully invested. The cast is good, the story was clever, and I would call it a win.
2025 Osiris
Directed by: William Kaufman
Written by: William Kaufman, Paul Reichelt
Stars: Max Martini, Linda Hamilton, Brianna Hildebrand
Run Time: 1 Hour, 48 Minutes
Trailer:
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
Shades of Predator, a group of soldiers is abducted from battle to wake up fully armed being hunted down by armed aliens in some kind of large facility. But the guys fight back, find a couple allies, and find out a lot more about where they are and what’s going on. Ironically the gunfighting action, which should be highly entertaining, drags on a bit here and there, and we both thought a trimming of 15 minutes or so would tighten things up. This was really good in every way except the pacing.
Spoilery Synopsis
We watch a space probe as the credits roll. We eventually pass Saturn on the way out of the solar system. The space probe is captured by… something.
We cut to a squad of soldiers on the ground. They shoot a bunch of enemies and announce that the war zone is all clear. No, they get ambushed in the street, and one of them gets shot. It’s all very intense. Suddenly, the music gets scary and the sky turns red. A spaceship appears and kills all the bad guys (the aliens are American?). Then it shoots something different, and all the American soldiers are abducted, probed, and examined.
Later, six of them wake up in slime; some kind of suspended animation process. They know things about the process that they shouldn’t; they can read a strange language. All their ammunition has been reloaded and resupplied. Kelly and Rhodie put together what happened to them, but they don’t remember much.
They start exploring the many tunnels of wherever they are. Reyes crawls through a small tunnel into another passage. They hear screams and go to check it out. They find men butchered and hanging from the ceiling. Then they find a woman hanging as well, alive, and she only speaks Russian. While they’re busy with that, an alien kills Gibbs and wreaks havoc until Rhodie shoots it with the alien’s own gun.
More aliens show up, and it’s soon a running fight. The aliens kill Reyes, but the others get away, briefly. The girl is Ravi, and she explains the situation. They are on the aliens’ spaceship, and the aliens eat meat. Human meat.
The group explores and finds pods with people trapped inside. The group all talks about where they’re from. It’s only a matter of time before the aliens find them, so they want to make a stand. This soon leads to yet another firefight, and this time, the aliens have energy shields. This just goes on and on until the guys end up in a garbage compactor full of skeletons and waste. They come across Anya, Riva’s mother, who looks like she fought a battle with a Terminator fifty years ago.
Anya asks them how long they’ve been awake. She says they were packed away in a trophy room as souvenirs. She thinks she’s been awake for 20 or 30 years. Time is hard to measure there. She knows that a 1977 NASA probe told the aliens where to find us. The map was called the “Map of Osiris,” and it was a really bad idea. They crushed Earth in a matter of weeks. The aliens captured all the best military people, turned their minds against them, and used the humans to defeat themselves.
She warns that the aliens are about to contact reinforcements, then they’ll just eat all the remaining humans. There’s only about two dozen aliens left on the ship, and the men want to fight. Kelly and Rhodie fight aliens as Anya, Ravi, and Nash plant explosives in the communications array. Rhodie goes out with a bang as Kelly runs to defend the others.
Aanya gets shot but blows up the explosives, killing lots of aliens and preventing the transmission. Kelly, Nash, and Riya are all that’s left. Kelly gets knocked out and dreams about his daughter and the alien invasion. Just as he’s about to be executed, Nash comes out of nowhere and shoots the baddies.
Kelly releases dozens of prisoners who run away. Nash cheers about how they did it, and then immediately dies. The big leader alien comes in and seems to want to fight Kelly with knives, of all things. Kelly, on the other hand, uses the fast-moving doors to his advantage and cuts the alien in half.
Kelly and Riya find an exit and see that they’re in the ruins of Paris after the apocalypse, on a spaceship that’s not currently in space.
Brian’s Commentary
It’s a mash-up of a bunch of other soldiers-vs-aliens stories, and it’s overall pretty good. It’s a little draggy, especially during the battles, which is odd. There’s lots of running and shooting in tunnels, and we don’t really get any kind of explanation until Linda Hamilton shows up an hour into the movie.
The aliens are simply one-dimensional monsters with guns, looking all monstrous, and there’s nothing much more to say. At one point, I said they looked “Like Adult Mutant Ninja Turtles,” and never got past that.
This feels like someone played a video game and then wrote a script from what happened. It’s OK, but far from great, and it would have been better with 20 minutes less of it.
Kevin’s Commentary
It’s very good, not quite great. As previously mentioned, a little trimming would have improved it. There were also a lot of people getting shot at with heavy weapons while out in the open and avoiding the bullets, which I kept having to work to ignore. But I liked the cast, the effects were great, and there was a decent story. Overall, I liked it quite a bit.
2016 Raw
Directed by: Julia Ducournau
Written by: Julia Ducournau
Stars: Garance Marillier, Ella Rumpf, Rabah Nait Oufella
Run Time: 1 Hour, 39 Minutes
Trailer:
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
This has a little bit of a slow start as the characters are set up, and we all endure an excessive amount of hazing. But once things get going, they get going well and it’s a pretty fine movie with lots of gore and ick moments. We both liked it, Brian more so than Kevin.
Spoilery Synopsis
A car drives down a deserted street and then crashes to avoid hitting someone who has jumped into the road. Credits roll.
Justine is in the cafeteria, and she’s clearly a vegetarian. She almost gets a meatball in her dinner and her mother reacts strongly. They soon drop her off at school and leave her there.
The first night in the dorm, her room gets invaded by her roommate, Adrien, and then a bunch of men in masks, here to haze them. Dozens and dozens of new students are trotted downstairs by the screaming maniacs and made to crawl on their hands and knees to a big party.
It’s quite a big dance party, and Justine would just as soon not be there. She’s grown up very sheltered, and this is all new to her. She runs into her older sister from home, Alexia. Alex takes her to the pictures of the old sororities, and they see their mother in one of the photos and their dad.
The next day, we see the students intubate a horse. The whole crowd gets blood dumped on them. It’s pledge week, and they’re all pledges. Then they make everyone eat rabbit kidneys, but Justine insists that she’s a vegetarian. She eats it but soon vomits it right back up.
That night, in bed, Justine notices that she has a weird, itchy rash. She goes to see the nurse, who asks all kinds of sexual questions. Eventually, she says it’s probably some kind of food poisoning. She hasn’t felt right since the raw rabbit kidney.
Justine steals a burger patty from the cafeteria. She doesn’t know why. Adrien thinks that’s weird, and so does she. He takes her out for some bread and shawarma. She’s a meat-eater now, and she’s really eager about it.
She helps Adrien with a test, gets called out by the professor, and then pukes up a huge hairball. Alex and Justine get drunk and pee all over themselves. Alex then bikini waxes Justine, and that goes badly; Alex loses a finger and passes out. As she waits for an ambulance, Justine can’t find any ice to pack the finger in, so she… eats it like a chicken wing. Halfway through, Alex wakes up and sees what’s going on.
The hospital brings in their parents. They blame the dog for eating the finger and there’s nothing else to be done, so the parents soon go home. Alex and Justine walk home down an isolated road, where Alex jumps out and makes a car crash - like we saw in the opening scene. She’s done this before. Alex opens the car door and takes a bite out of the mortally wounded man inside. It’s not just Justine who craves meat.
In class, they have to dissect dogs, and Justine works with Adrien. Later she starts to notice just how tasty he looks with his shirt off. Still, he’s her roommate and gay, so she tries to ignore that.
Justine walks to the wrong place and gets doused in blue paint as another stupid hazing event. She then has to make out with a yellow painted man until they are green. She bites his lip instead. She goes home and has sex with her supposed-to-be-gay roommate, Adrien. She keeps trying to bite him, but he keeps pushing her head back. She ends up biting herself for satisfaction.
There’s another party that night, and Justine gets really, really drunk. She’s all over the men at the party until Alex pulls her into the school’s morgue. We don’t see what happens next.
The next day, Adrien shows her video footage of what happened last night. Alex made Justine bite a corpse for the camera. This results in a very bitey girlfight outside the building as everyone films with their cameras.
The horn sounds, and pledge week is finally over.
Justine wakes up next to Adrien, who turns out to be dead and half-eaten. What did she do last night? Maybe she didn’t– she finds Alex in the room holding a bloody ski pole that she used to stab him with.
Later, Justine visits Alex in prison with her parents. Her father assures her that it’s not her fault or Alex’s. Their mother is very special. He opens his shirt, and he’s just covered in bite marks and scars.
“I’m sure you’ll find a solution, honey.”
Brian’s Commentary
French universities are weird. That’s the first thing I learned here. The whole hazing thing is and always has been ridiculous.
The first hour is slow getting to the point, especially all the school hazing nonsense, but once it gets going, it really amps up the ick pretty quickly.
It’s pretty awesome!
Kevin’s Commentary
I could tolerate that first initiation incident when the upperclassmen raid the freshman rooms, dump their beds out the window, and herd them all to a party being acceptable to all involved and the folks running the school. But I found myself growing annoyed by the hazing that kept going on to the point of bullshit and distraction. Other than that, it was a very fine movie, full of gore and good acting and character development. Especially gore. I’d give it a strong, but not quite solid, thumbs up.
2018 Hellraiser: Judgment
Directed by: Gary J. Tunnicliffe
Written by: Clive Barker, Gary J. Tunnicliffe
Stars: Damon Carney, Randy Wayne, Alexandra Harris
Run Time: 1 Hour, 21 Minutes
Trailer:
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
Here we get to see some of the workings of Hell with other characters in the process besides the Cenobites, plus we get our first heavenly creature of the series and the lines between good and evil get blurred. It’s the tenth in the original series, and probably the last because things got rebooted. It’s not the best of them, but not the worst either, about in the middle.
Spoilery Synopsis
Pinhead and The Auditor talk about the 21st century and the changes it’s brought. Technology has advanced, but humans still sin. Elsewhere, a homeless man, Watkins, gets a message offering to help him. He goes inside a run down house and ends up tied to a chair. The Auditor assures that he knows Watkins’ crimes, and offers him a reward. He quickly makes Watkins confess to murdering and raping children, typing them out into words with Watkin’s blood as the ink.
Next, The Assessor comes in, and he’s got the tears of children in a bottle. They taste goooood. He eats The Auditor’s report and then vomits it right back up into a basin. Three scarred women, the jury, then dig in the vomit and pronounce Watkins “Guilty.” Bad things happen after that. Credits roll.
A woman goes home to find someone in her house that wants to make a lesson out of her. Two detectives arrive soon after to check out her body. Detective Christine Edgerton comes in and interrupts the first two, who are brothers, Sean and David. “The Preceptor” is a serial killer that they’ve all been following. They watch as a little dog digs its way out of the corpse.
Sean goes home to see his very unhappy wife, Alison. Meanwhile David fills in Christine about The Preceptor. We get a detecting montage. They soon get called to a new crime scene, full of the hands and eyes of four thieves. After a little research, they go to Watkins’ apartment.
Sean finds an address, and it’s the place where we saw Watkins tortured a while back. He, too, finds himself tied up in front of The Auditor. Soon, Sean is confessing his sins. The Assessor comes in, as before, and eats the report. This time, however, it makes his mouth bleed and he can’t finish it. He vomits up what little he had, and the Jury can’t handle it either. Upset, The Auditor talks to a glowing woman who tells him to release Sean. He then goes to report to Pinhead, who discovers that Sean has already escaped– with a puzzle box.
Sean picks up his brother David and goes back to the house, which is now completely deserted. There’s no sign that anyone has ever been there, and Sean won’t explain to David why. That night, Sean dreams of the Cenobites. This leads to weird sex with his wife, who has no idea what’s going on.
David and Christine talk about how weird Sean has been acting since he got back from the war. She says the higher-ups in the department are concerned that Sean’s losing his mind over this case.
The medical examiner calls, They found the dead woman’s phone lodged inside her (it wasn’t just the dog), so they have some GPS coordinates from where she died. This leads Sean and Christine to the killer’s lair, and there are photos of all the victims there.
They find a photo of David with Sean’s wife, and then Sean beats up Christine, who wasn’t supposed to see that. Yes, Sean’s been the killer all along. David comes along, and Sean pulls his gun on him. Sean calls Alison, his wife, to join them. Sean explains his motivations and then hands David the puzzle box, ordering them to open it.
Pinhead shows up. Sean offers David and Alison to him in exchange for his freedom. Pinhead and The Auditor explain that’s not how this all works. Hooks and chains pop out of the walls, and now Sean’s a prisoner. David and Alison get taken away quickly, “Amateurs,” mocks Pinhead. But he’ll give them some suffering because Sean is such a prize.
Suddenly, Jophiel, the angel, shows up. She wants Sean released, making a mess of things. God needs there to be evil so that good can exist. Pinhead’s not eager to comply. She clarifies that Sean’s not being forgiven, just used. Suddenly, Sean’s back in the real world. BOOM! Christine shoots him repeatedly; she wasn’t dead after all.
Jophiel accuses Pinhead of knowing that would happen, and he doesn’t deny it. He turns the hooks and chains on her and then puts some of his “pins” in her forehead. He tears her apart. “You probably should not have done that,” quips The Auditor.
Pinhead gets banished back to the mortal world. We see him on the street as a homeless man…
Brian’s Commentary
So it appears that there’s a whole bureaucracy behind Pinhead and Hell, and we get to see some of it here with the Assessor, Auditor, Jury, and the rest. They recast Pinhead again, but we don’t really get very much of him in this. He’s much better than the previous guy, but he’s still no Doug Bradley.
The mystery isn’t really much of a mystery, and we never really care about any of the characters. The behind-the-scenes of Hell makes this one interesting, but it doesn’t look like we’ll get another sequel since they rebooted the series instead of continuing.
It’s not the worst of the bunch, but it’s not great. I’d put it at probably 4th or 5th best of the series after 1,2,3, and maybe 9.
Kevin’s Commentary
I, too, would put it at about my 5th favorite of the series. The re-recasting of Pinhead is an improvement; the effects are good, and the story is decent. I did find myself caring about characters. I was entertained throughout.
1975 Terror of Mechagodzilla
Directed by: Ishiro Honda, Jun Fukuda
Written by: Yukiko Takayama
Stars: Katsuhiko Sasaki, Tomoko Ai, Akihiko Hirata
Run Time: 1 Hour, 19 Minutes
Trailer:
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
Mechagodzilla was destroyed in the last movie, but those pesky aliens that built it are back. They found the pieces and rebuilt it even stronger and better. With another big critter in the mix this time too, will Godzilla be able to save the day? Will humanity give the aliens the boot once again? You can probably guess how things come out in the end. It’s more of the same as before, not quite as well put together as some of the previous ones, but still pretty good.
Spoilery Synopsis
We open on scenes from the previous film, reminding us about what Mechagodzilla is as credits roll. We also get a reminder of just how bloody the previous film was.
We cut to a submarine, diving deep to find the wreckage of Mechagodzilla. Meanwhile, a strange woman sits on the beach but can see what’s happening with the sub in her mind’s eye. They can’t find it– the wreckage is gone! They do, however, run into some kind of giant creature down there that destroys the sub.
At Interpol, the experts discuss the loss of the sub. There are photos of flying saucers that may have been involved. Akira is a marine biologist who’s been brought in to help. Could the sub have been wrecked by… a dinosaur? The alien leaders, also from the previous film, talk about how stupid humans are. They talk about recruiting Dr. Mafune, a disgruntled human, to assist their plan. He was a promising scientist until he claimed he could control Titanosaurus, a type of dinosaur that no one believed existed. He’s been an outcast ever since.
Akira and his friend Wakayama go to find Dr. Mafune who lives in a “haunted house” that the locals avoid. Mafune’s daughter Katsura comes to the door, and she says the old doctor died five years ago. She’s the one we saw on the beach earlier. She says she doesn’t know anything, and the two men don’t believe her.
We cut to Dr. Mafune and the alien leader’s bearded second-in-command, Tsuda, drinking a toast to the Titanosaurus control device being finished. They all go down to the secret alien lab beneath the ground, and they see Mechagodzilla there being rebuilt and repaired. Supreme Leader Mugal wants to use Mafune’s dinosaur control device on the big robot.
Akira goes back to Katsura and talks about her father’s work. He says they’re preparing another sub, and she warns him not to be on it. Later, Tsuda reminds her who saved her life a few years back, and then we get a flashback showing us what happened.
Tsuda tells Katsura to make Titanosaurus attack the sub, and the big monster is soon chasing it. The sub uses ultrasonic weapons to make the monster flee.
Matsura and her father discuss Titanosaurus’s weaknesses. Akira and Wakayama discuss the possibility that their enemies may be from Black Hole Planet Three. Katsura takes some of her father’s notebooks to Akira to discuss, and they have tea. He tells them all their plans, and she relays that to the baddies. Old Dr. Mafune is tired of helping the aliens, and he thinks Titanosaurus could defeat Mechagodzilla in a fight.
Titanosaurus comes ashore and everyone panics. Wakayama spots Katsura there, where she shouldn’t be and suspects that she’s in league with the aliens. The aliens, on the other hand, want to see Titanosaurus fight the real Godzilla. The two monsters will fight and use all their strength on each other, and nothing will be able to stop their attack on Tokyo with Mechagodzilla.
Godzilla shows up very quickly to defend Tokyo, and the two dinosaur-like creatures do what they do best: fight. Katsura gets caught by soldiers and is shot, which makes her father call off the attack for now. Except we see that she’s a robot and simply in need of repair. It turns out, she personally is the Titanosaurus control device, and she’s being upgraded to control Mechagodzilla as well.
Akira is taken prisoner and meets all the bad guys. Katsura activates Mechagodzilla, and he rises up out of the lair. The Interpol agents are right outside, and they sneak in just before the place self-destructs.
In Tokyo, Mechagodzilla and Titanosaurus both attack the city in an orgy of destruction (their words, not mine). Godzilla shows up just in time to save some kids, and the tag-team battle is on! The pair gang up on Godzilla, shoot him repeatedly, and then bury him.
The Interpol scientists fly in a helicopter with an ultrasonic device that distracts Titanosaurus, just as Godzilla rises up to blast Mechagodzilla.
Meanwhile, the alien’s base is under attack, and Akira has slipped his bonds. He kills Tsuda and pulls off his artificial face. Katsura pulls a pistol on Akira, but the Interpol agent shoots her first, much to Akira’s disappointment. Her father dies, and she begs Akira to destroy her, which will deactivate the creatures outside. She ends up shooting herself.
Outside, Godzilla rips off Mechagodzilla’s head once again, but this time, it’s just a mask and there’s another head inside. Godzilla tears up what’s left of Mechagodzilla.
The alien leader escapes in his flying saucer, but Godzilla shoots it down. Godzilla kills Titanosaurus and then wades back out into the ocean.
Brian’s Commentary
This is the final movie of what’s called the “Showa Era,” and there wouldn’t be any more Godzilla movies for nearly a decade.
This one took a little too long to get to the guys in rubber suits. It’s almost an hour before Tokyo gets attacked, and what we see before that is very brief. Still, it’s a direct continuation of the previous film, and it’s a decent wrap-up of the “Black Hole Planet Three” plotline.
Kevin’s Commentary
I thought the pacing was a bit off in this one. There was a long stretch of people doing stuff, but it seemed a little clunky this time around. Then it gets to some creature battles of course. The alien helmets were especially impressive. It was okay, I thought, not my favorite and not a strong finish to the era.
Short Films:
2025 Short Film Turing Test
Directed by: Jaschar Marktanner
Written by: Jaschar Marktanner
Stars: Marlene Fahnster, Richard Lingscheidt, Özen Fidan
Run Time: 6:28
Watch it: Not Yet– It’s coming soon!
What Happens
Two emotionless people discuss an upcoming demonstration that they hope will be a success. They both seem a little… off, almost robotic in nature. Every once in a while, one of them will say something completely unrelated to the situation. Could one of them just possibly be an artificial intelligence?
Commentary
Is the Turing test all it’s cracked up to be?
It’s probably more sci-fi than horror, but wherever that ending is heading is more scary than any slasher. The acting here is very good, as for a good while, we’re not sure who is human and who isn’t. Sometimes the machines are smarter than they let on…
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