We’ve got an interesting batch of films this week! We’ll start with “NFT: Cursed Images,” which explains that some NFTs are even worse than others! “Haunters of the Silence” shows us that grief is the monster we met along the way, and “Forty Five” brings us to the edge of Armageddon. “Obex”, on the other hand, is a fun, techno-fantasy that takes a few dark turns along the way. Lastly, we’ll start watching the “Silent Hill” series, with more of those to come in the coming weeks.
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Mainstream Films:
2026 NFT: Cursed Images
Directed by: Jonas Odenheimer
Written by: Jonas Odenheimer
Stars: Najarra Townsend, David Wayman, Mariah Nonnemacher
Run Time: 1 hour 13 minutes
Trailer:
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
It’s 2021 and NFTs are hot. A group of young friends in London start having some big troubles when they receive some that have curses attached. The rules and the ending seemed a little unclear, but we both liked it more than disliked it, with Kevin being a bit more favorable toward it.
Spoilery Synopsis
A couple walks home late at night. Sue thinks she sees something and gets spooked. She talks about how an NFT scared her. Her friend is making a lot of money with them, and her friend passed one on to her. There are supposed to be dozens of these cursed images that are shared online. Sue can’t get through to her friend now. Suddenly, Mark vanishes. When Sue tries to call the police, all she sees on her phone is that NFT. Credits roll.
It’s 2021, and NFTs are still a thing. Kit is a successful NFT trader. Dan complains about being a Millennial and the current job market. There are Boomer and Doomer jokes. The whole group got rich with crypto, except for poor Dan, who’s a whiner.
James doesn’t know what an NFT is, and the others can’t explain it to make sense. Julie and Cass arrive, and Kit’s not happy about that. The women have exactly the same thoughts about the men. They all seem to be infatuated with NFTs– it’s even better than crypto!
The group talks James and Dan into buying some NFTs right now. They explain the nonsense that is an NFT. Kit suddenly has seven NFTs transferred to his account out of the blue. It’s from a collection called “Crypto Horrors.” Sarah’s heard of those, they’re real cursed images. There are only 666 of them, and they get Airdropped to you at random. He sends each person one of them.
The party breaks up, and everyone leaves. Later, Kit wakes up to a weird stretchy-faced ghost woman in his room.
Cass remembers that she left her phone at Kit’s place, and Julia suggests asking James to go back and get it. Sarah walks home and gets texts from Kit’s phone, but the person texting isn’t Kit. She soon finds out who’s stalking her.
James and Cass go back to Kit’s for her phone. They find the place a mess, and then Cass wants to go check on Sarah, who also isn’t answering her phone.
We cut to Dan, who is also walking home in an isolated tunnel. Something is chasing him. Julia: The same.
Nes is watching YouTube videos about NFTs and gets a panicked call from Dan, who says he saw his NFT chasing him. Dan believes in the curse now and every one is unique just like NFTs are, but Nes just laughs it off. All the NFTs are based on old legends, and possibly real curses. Julia also comes to Nes, and she’s been experiencing the same thing as Dan. James also calls and tells him that Kit and Sarah have gone missing. Julia leaves, and her monster gets her right after. Nes takes a show and gets his.
James arrives at Nes’s house, talking to Dan on the phone all the while. He sees Nas’s NFT there and scares it away by showing it a reflection of itself, like Dan tipped him off should work. Dan says if that worked, then maybe they do have a chance against the curse. Dan looks up Cass’s curse and says it can be stopped by striking it with a sword.
Meanwhile, James’s own NFT comes after him, as does Dan’s. Dan is attacked, but his monster goes away suddenly. He gets a notification that his NFT has sold for .5 ETH. He’s free of the curse. Dan calls James and tells him to sell or transfer his NFT right now. James transfers his right then; Dan gets the notification that it was transferred to him. Dan dies right away.
Dan calls Cass and tells her to dump that NFT right away. She says she already gave it away to some random guy on Twitter. Cass goes to Sarah’s place and talks to her corpse. It possesses her somehow, which gives James a final scare.
Brian’s Commentary
The background music is occasionally too loud; it’s often hard to follow all the British people talking due to the noise. The visuals are all pretty good, as is the acting. The creatures themselves are not particularly impressive, but we mostly only get glimpses of them.
I’ve done crypto, but I never understood NFTs at all. Of course, I was eventually proved right on those. Even today, I still don’t understand where the value was supposed to come from. Still, the only thing they normally kill in real life is your net worth.
I like the idea of cursed NFTS, and that they appear from nowhere. The ending made no real sense. Are the victims killed or possessed? Cass should have been spared, but the monsters weren’t following their own rules.
It’s a neat concept, but the actual story was a little underwhelming.
Kevin’s Commentary
We could have used subtitles. Perhaps it was just in the quality of our screener.
I thought the party was a bit draggy at first, but things move quickly once that breaks up with the NFTs doing their thing that very night. The digitized creature effects are brief, but pretty cool. All the effects do the job well.
Like Brian points out, the monsters don’t seem to follow the rules, and the ending was a little unclear. But overall, I was entertained, which is what really counts. It’s a pretty good one.
2025 Haunters of the Silence
Director: Tatu Heikkinen, Veleda Thorsson-Heikkinen
Writers: Tatu Heikkinen, Veleda Thorsson-Heikkinen
Stars: Tatu Heikkinen (as K.), John Haughm (as Hat Man), Veleda Thorsson-Heikkinen (as Wife)
Runtime: 1 hour 11 minutes
YouTube Trailer Link:
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
The IMDB description says “In the stillness of night, a man is trapped between worlds. As darkness closes in and reality blurs, he must confront the Haunters of the Silence.” and it’s hard to pin down more of a story than that. The visuals are very cool, sound and music is effective, and Tatu Heikkinen is completely natural going about through his days and haunted nights.
Spoilery Synopsis
A man walks along the beach and eventually stops to dump someone’s ashes into the water. As he drives home, credits roll.
The man, K, sits in his house, and we see photos and things of his wife, who is apparently the one who died. He goes to sleep, and we see all around his house. An alert from his porch camera wakes him up, and he goes out to investigate. Finding nothing, he goes back inside and checks inside the house. More weird stuff happens after he goes back to bed, so he searches some more. He falls to the floor and starts hallucinating.
K runs through the misty forest and comes to an abandoned building. It all gets pretty surreal and weird. After a while, he starts being pursued by a man in a hat. K wakes up when he gets a phone call from his father. He then dreams about skulls and bones followed by many other weird visuals.
K wakes up and sees his wife at the bottom of the bed. “It’s OK,” she says. We then hear a recording of a poem, “The Haunters of the Silence.”
The alarm goes off, and K gets out of bed. He makes some tea and goes outside. Suddenly, it’s the middle of the night again. He’s still in the dream, and he can’t get out. The man in the hat comes into his bedroom and– the film ends.
Brian’s Commentary
It’s super slow-moving and atmospheric. Everything is hazy and dreamlike, which reflects the main character’s state of mind after losing his wife. It was inspired by the director/writer/star’s experience with sleep paralysis. It’s all very visual, but there’s no real plot to speak of; it’s just K and what he sees, or imagines he sees. There’s also no real dialogue, as K is alone through the whole film.
It’s basically a nightmare on film. It’s surprisingly relaxing, and I almost caught myself going to sleep a couple of times, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. It’s unique and weird!
Kevin’s Commentary
I’d say the visuals are the number one thing going for this. Very cool.
There is a nightmare quality to many of the scenes, and the whole thing is surreal. Without much of a story. A guy in mourning attends therapy, takes medication, tries to get through his days, and looks like he’s having nightmares with sleep paralysis.
I agree with Brian, I found it more relaxing than disturbing. I’d say that I liked it.
2025 Forty Five
Directed by: Bazz Hancher
Written by: Bazz Hancher, Michael Walcott
Stars: Benedict Bareford, Sean Botha, Ryan Brunt
Run Time: 40 Minutes
Trailer:
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
After Fallon loses his daughter, his search for answers leads him on a surreal and creepy quest wrapped up in religious prophecy. It builds well as it goes along until a chilling finish. We were both impressed.
Spoilery Synopsis
We get a Biblical math lesson; it is the end of days– 45 days to go. It’s June 6th, 2022. Police and detectives examine a crime scene out in a field. A young girl was murdered and bitten, some kind of ritual killing.
Three years later, Carson and Fallon talk about “45” whoever that is. 45 is dangerous, and whoever gets close to him dies. Despite the warning, Fallon, the dead girl’s father, still wants to know more. Fallon goes to see Father Vaughn, who knows something about the case.
Vaughn talks about the Book of Daniel and the end times. He believes that 45 killed Fallon’s daughter, and he’s also involved with the Antichrist and the end of the world through a holy war. Fallon’s daughter may have been sent by God to defeat the Antichrist, which is why she was killed. As soon as Fallon leaves, the old priest collapses and dies.
Several times, we see the ghost of Fallon’s daughter in the background, but he doesn’t notice. Fallon goes to visit Blake, the detective who was in charge of the case three years ago. “Do you know what you’re getting into?” says the sickly, dying detective. He also warns Fallon to stop investigating. The closer Blake got to finding 45, the sicker he got; it’s like cancer, but it’s not.
Fallon next goes to a weird woman who has been beaten. She’s a disciple of forty-five; a false prophet. She gets intense.
Fallon wakes up with forty-five. The goatman creature admits everything and explains it all. Fallon gets a vision of himself being his daughter’s killer as he passes out.
Brian’s Commentary
As an American, I found the accents a little difficult, and I watch lots of British films. There was a good bit of dialogue from some characters that I just missed out on, which detracted from my understanding of what was going on.
It’s all very ominous and most of the film builds suspense as Fallon digs deeper into the problem. The visuals are excellent, and it all looks great.
Kevin’s Commentary
I agree with Brian on the accents, but I got used to them as it got going and could understand it clearly.
I thought it builds nicely, was creepy and unsettling, and it looks really good. IMDB says the estimated budget was only $2,700.00, if that’s correct it’s especially impressive for such a small sum.
I give it a thumbs up.
2025 Obex
Director: Albert Birney
Writers: Albert Birney, Pete Ohs
Stars: Albert Birney (Conor), Frank Mosley (Victor)
Runtime: 90 minutes
YouTube Trailer Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG9VrEeKk-I
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
Conor leads a quiet isolated life at home with his dog, computer, and media in 1987. And everything is so normal until he plays the computer game OBEX. Then reality and digital start to blur together when he goes on a quest to find his missing dog inside the game. It’s slow moving and fascinating, kind of surreal. We both really enjoyed it.
Spoilery Synopsis
It’s 1987. Conor watches three TVs at once. He feeds the dog and takes out the trash; he seems normal enough. He watches a show about people making a cicada omelette. He then types in and prints off an ASCII portrait on his computer.
Mary comes to the door, bringing groceries, but he doesn’t let her in– he apparently never leaves the house. After she leaves, he checks the mail, and finds that he’s got a new computer magazine. He’s got an ad in there about his photo art service. He turns the page and sees an ad for a new game called OBEX. It promises to “insert you into the game.” Cool! He records a video that tells the gamemakers about himself so that he can be put into a game. He has a weird dream about his dead mother.
The OBEX game soon arrives in the mail. He loads it right in and gets started. The game actually has Conor’s image in it. It’s clunky by today’s standards, but he seems to enjoy it for a minute or two. It doesn’t do much, so he quickly gives up and deletes it.
Mary comes to the door, asking if he’s found blood in his milk. He looks outside and sees a dying cicada. The cicadas are everywhere in his backyard, and he constantly sees them. He gets back to work digitizing children’s photos but the picture is ruined by a cicada in his printer. That night, it’s another nightmare but then he wakes up when he hears the printer working. It says “Remove your skin” over and over.
The next night, the TVs come on by themselves, the OBEX game comes onto the computer, and a glowing creature comes out of the TVs from the game. It wanders around the house and notices Sandy the dog.
In the morning, Sandy the dog is gone, missing. Conor goes looking for his dog out in the nearby woods and finds his computer out there, still with the OBEX game running. Sandy the dog is now inside the game, along with cicadas. All of a sudden, Conor is inside the game as well, now with a long beard and surrounded by little fairies. He runs into a videogame version of Mary, who is an NPC now. She tells him about the demon king Ixaroth, who took Sandy. She gives him supplies and tells him where to go.
Conor walks through the Dark Forest as it’s shown on the gaming map. He camps in the “Meadow of Regrets.” The next day, he comes across a pair of humanoid cicadas torturing a humanoid TV monitor. Conor kills the baddies with his sword. The TV man is Victor. The two find a car that reminds Conor of his mother. Victor speculates on what TV Heaven might be like.
That night, he stops when he sees a naked woman and man in the road. They start to spin and lose their skins– they’re just skeletons. They attack him, and he sees “Game Over” in the sky. He does, however, get the option to “Retry.”
Conor wakes up with Victor and Mary; he’s reborn, and they soon restart their journey to the dark castle. They soon arrive at the Nightmare Realm but there’s a big combination padlock keeping the gate shut.
In the morning, Conor has aged significantly. Victor has opened the gate, but died in the attempt. Conor enters the videogame castle, and it’s full of cicada-men. He finds Sandy’s bones, and there’s also a wolf– and Freddy Krueger. All his worst nightmares come to life all at once. Eventually, Ixaroth appears and demands that Conor remove his skin. Conor attacks and defeats Ixaroth.
We, and Conor himself, watches as Sandy and Conor’s avatar reunite and go to the beach. “The End” comes up on the computer screen, and Conor exits out of the game. The two then go to the beach for real– happy ending!
Brian’s Commentary
I loved all the old computer technology, although I never imagined people did that kind of ASCII art by hand. The rest of it– I remember. The black-and-white makes it all seem more surreal, and it does fit in a bunch of old videogame tropes.
It’s slow-moving, and there’s not much action, but the concept and execution are really interesting, and it never gets dull. I liked this one a lot.
Kevin’s Commentary
It was a quiet nostalgia trip through 1987 at first, watching Conor go through his days. Then things get weird when he plays OBEX.
For such a slow moving film, I kept expecting to get bored, but I didn’t. It’s strange and very good.
2006 Silent Hill
Director: Christophe Gans
Writers: Roger Avary
Stars: Radha Mitchell, Sean Bean, Laurie Holden, Deborah Kara Unger, Kim Coates, Tanya Allen, Alice Krige, Jodelle Ferland
Runtime: 126 minutes
Trailer Link:
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
Little Sharon has a strange ailment that makes her sleepwalk and have hallucinations, so adopted mother Rose takes her to Silent Hill trying to find answers. She ends up having a weird and dark adventure - almost like a horror video game. Which the movie is based from. The effects and story are creepy, but we both thought at over two hours long it gets draggy and repetitive here and there.
Spoilery Synopsis
Sharon has gone missing in the middle of the night. Her mother, Rose, runs through the woods after her and arrives at a huge waterfall. She sees Sharon on a nearby cliff and tackles her. Sharon screams “Silent Hill” over and over. Christopher, the father, catches up to them and carries Sharon home. Credits roll.
Sometime later, Rose asks Sharon about Silent Hill and her sleepwalking. Sharon doesn’t remember any of it, so they’re going there for a visit– without Sharon’s father. He looks on Rose’s computer, and it’s full of information about “The Tainted Town,” the ghost town of Silent Hill. Christopher says Sharon needs to be in a hospital, under medication. Could Sharon have come from there?
Rose and Sharon stop at a gas station for directions to Silent Hill. A strange policewoman stops and talks to Sharon. They break through the fence to Silent Hill with the cop in pursuit, and that goes badly when they crash.
When Rose wakes up, ash is falling from the sky, and Sharon is gone. The sign says, “Welcome to Silent Hill.” She walks on into town, and it’s completely abandoned and hard to see through the falling ash. She sees someone running in the distance and gives chase, but cannot catch up. An air-raid siren goes off. She goes down a tunnel into a big maze of corridors. Then she runs into hundreds of little mutant-children-looking things that chase her.
Somehow, Rose makes it back outside. She runs into a woman outside who says “We’ve all lost our children.”
Christopher talks to a mechanic about Silent Hill, a town that still has a coal fire burning underneath it. He comes to the gate that Rose broke through and talks to the cops there. Rose’s vehicle has been found empty, and the cop mentions he’s also missing a deputy. They drive into town, and it looks completely different to them: abandoned, but normal.
The police officer, Bennet, catches Rose and handcuffs her. They start walking, but soon reach the “end of the world” and cannot leave town. They soon encounter an armless wobbling mutant, and Bennett ends up shooting it.
Rose continues exploring the abandoned town and seeing weird things. She encounters strange men in gas masks and hides in a school. The siren goes off again, and Rose finds the room she’s in decaying before her eyes. The gas mask men are eaten by giant cockroaches.
We see that Christopher and Officer Gucci are searching in the same physical location as where Rose actually is, but it’s in a parallel universe or something. Things get crazy, and Rose runs back into Office Bennett again, and this time, she’s more open to cooperation. The pyramid-head man has quite a knife, and he’s not afraid to use it. They drive him off for a while and get out of the building.
Chris doesn’t believe the police about what happened to Silent Hill, but the archivist refuses to help him. He breaks into the library that night and reads through the old records. He finds a photo of Sharon; maybe she did come from Silent Hill.
Rose and Bennett head toward a large hotel and suspect that Sharon might be inside. They meet Anna, another mother of a missing child. She lives with Christobella, who keeps them safe; there are others here. They enter room 111, where they find a girl who looks just like Sharon; she’s Alessa. Anna screams, “The darkness is coming,” and they all run to the church. Dahlia, a crazy woman, warns Rose not to go with the others as they’re all dead. Pyramid-head shows up and does something really bad to Anna.
Inside the church, the people point at Bennett and Rose and call them witches. The leader, Christobella, comes to them. She talks about the demon who takes children. It’s all very cult-ish.
Christopher goes to the orphanage where he adopted Sharon, and wants to know where she came from. Officer Gucci arrests Chris for disturbing the peace. Gucci talks about Alessa, and how she was killed thirty years ago.
A group of the cultists, led by Christobella, takes the two outsider women to a huge building where the demon is said to live. Rose takes an elevator to the lower levels, but the cultists beat Bennett half to death. Rose encounters a roomful of undead nurses, but they seem to only be active when her light is on. She switches it off and walks among them– until they wake up and attack anyway.
Rose hears Sharon/Alessa’s voice, and it tells about what happened to Alessa and her mother, Dahlia. The locals kidnapped Alessa and killed her for a sacrifice, but that went badly for the whole town. Alessa was horribly burned, and her hate grew so strong that she gained mental powers to get revenge on the town. Turns out, Sharon is Alessa’s own daughter, given to the orphanage to protect her from the monsters.
In the church, Christobella plans to finish what she started by sacrificing Sharon. They burn Bennett first. Rose shows up and talks about the world outside, at least until Christobella stabs her.
Suddenly, a hole opens in the floor and barbed wire snakes out. The real Alessa rises up, still confined to her bed, and she grabs Christobella with the wire. The wires and Rose set about slaughtering all the cultists. Dahlia comes in and recognizes her daughter.
In the morning, Rose and Sharon wake up and leave the church. They walk to the car and drive back out of the town, across the bridge. She calls Chris to say they’re coming home.
They arrive at their home, but it’s all dim and foggy, not like the sunny world that Chris still lives in. They’re still in two different worlds even though they’re in the same room…
Brian’s Commentary
Sean Bean didn’t die? Huh. Actually, he only interacted with Rose for a minute at the beginning, otherwise, his part is mostly unrelated to the action.
I’ve played a little bit of the original game, way back when it came out in 1999, and they’ve definitely got the atmosphere of the game here.
It’s well over two hours long, and it does drag quite a bit. Overall the visuals are excellent, but the story really drags in the middle.
It’s a weird one, for sure.
Kevin’s Commentary
It certainly does have a video game vibe to it.
The shots of the police and husband searching the “real” Silent Hill in the same locations simultaneously that Rose was in those same locations in the underworld was cool.
I liked the atmosphere, effects, and story, but it’s on the long side and drags after a while.
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