*God, if I can somehow get Clancy Brown to introduce this show, it'd be beautiful but now, you'll just have to imagine his deep, rich voice* DAY 2! GIVE IT UP FOR DAY 2, EVERYONE!

31 Days of Halloween continues down the Universal Monsters track. Not even a year after DRACULA's release, wunderkind producer Carl Laemmle Jr. comes back swinging with FRANKENSTEIN, a James Whale-directed adaptation of Mary Shelley's novel.

Bela Lugosi is interested in returning. Junior is stoked! Lugosi reads the script and waitaminute, this is for the monster; I wanted to be Henry Frankenstein, what the fuck?

Enter Boris Karloff, a veteran English stage actor with 80 credits to his name before taking on the role of the lumbering Creature.

Borne of the crude surgery of dead parts and a good ol' blast of lightning, this Creature is the product of Frankenstein's (Colin Clive) defiance against God, the natural order, showers (Look in my eyes and truthfully deny it, I dare you. Henry be stinky.) and sanity.

This movie established the benchmark for many who would follow. Any mad scientist crafts their lab in response to the bubbling breakers and sparkling electronics of Whale's movie. The locked-knee hobbling accentuated by grunts and baritone moans for any monstrous brute comes from Karloff's performance. Even cartoons joke about angry mobs with torches and pitchforks, aping this movie's ending. The influence reaches further than one can imagine.

And while I dock points for the movie meandering about Henry's wedding (The dude just created life and you people wanna think about bouquets?) and a lack of time developing the Creature's intelligence, as does the novel, that influence makes this a must-watch. For this Universal Monsters run, it's important to see where we've been to better chart where horror can go.

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Merry October, you beautiful people! For a holiday as fun as Halloween, who has the right to limit the party to one day? No-fucking-body.

That's why on THE MOVIES, I'm celebrating for 31 straight days. This project allows me to further dig down the rabbit hole of my favorite genre, horror, discovering subterranean weird-ass, BARBARIAN-esque detours I've yet to witness. Hold my hand and don't let go. For this entire month, we're gonna get scary.

How better to start this bacchanalia of blood than with five days of the Universal Monsters? And how better to begin this run than with the eternally imitated progenitor, Count Dracula?

Tod Browning directed and Karl Freund directed the photography (and the whole movie, depending on who you ask) but for my money, this is Bela Lugosi's movie. He's hypnotic, alluring, even amiable at times but don't cross him. He'll just as soon eye you like a panther and in one move, strike. This performance is so iconic, even SESAME STREET had to ape it. Does an Academy Award even MATTER at that point?

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NICKEL BOYS is one of a kind. That's not to say the narrative is brand-new. Two Black teens struggling to keep their sanity while stuck in an abusive institution brings to mind ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST, THE GREAT ESCAPE, the millennial cinematic classic HOLES.

But where NICKEL BOYS differs, as the great Roger Ebert wrote, is in HOW it's about what it's about. The camera is an extension of the main characters, their first-person perspective. But unlike other films that've adopted this approach, NICKEL BOYS invests its energy into the authenticity of this perspective.

Think about yourself reading this. You might glance down, turn your head to see a phone notification. You might reread the last paragraph and conjure a mental image of Jack Nicholson or Nurse Ratched. Is that thought confined by a tiny editor in your head, INSIDE OUT-style, reacting with the timing of someone who wants the smoothest cut? No. It's instant. How can the experience of being human and all its minutia be translated to a cinematic language? That's where NICKEL BOYS shines.

Ross, along with cinematographer Jomo Fray, move their cameras patiently, deliberately in a manner that attempts to pull this off, described in interviews as a "sentient experience." As such, the result is immersive, at times feeling like I or you or she or he have possessed Elwood (Ethan Herisse) or Turner (Brandon Wilson) as they navigates their Black body through 1960s Florida.

By doing so, Ross reminds us that while we may not be Black, the story of Nickel Academy and its culture of murdering children, contrasted with the promise of new civil rights and space exploration, is not merely a subgenre of history. It's our collective memory. It's our duty and responsibility to accept, from which to learn and rebuke.

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DROP follows Violet (Meghann Fahy), a widow/single mom going on her first date after the violent death of her abusive husband.

All looks promising across the dinner table: Henry (Brendon Sklenar) is a charming, attractive, thoughtful guy. He's a photographer for the mayor. He bought a trinket for her 5-year-old. He's got a good wit. Perfect first outing, right?

The problem lies in Violet's' phone. She's receiving these anonymous airdrops from someone in the restaurant. What starts as a couple of dumb memes quickly devolves as the dropper gets personal and eventually instructs her to kill Henry or the masked man in her house will kill her son and sister. One glance of her security cameras confirms the worst. The game is on.

Who's doing this? Why her? Why Henry? How's Violet gonna save her family? This is the wind of the car that's gonna send us through DROP's Hitchcock-inspired story. I enjoy Fahy and Sklenar's chemistry & the production design dazzles my comfort-seeking soul. However, bringing Violet's panicked state to the screen results in some distracting lighting setups, framing and VFX work (You've likely never before seen cell phone text glare onto 70% of the screen across multiple instances.) The end of the movie goes for entertaining, if stupid, gonzo; The blend of serious subjects and pulpy execution leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

It's not a worst offender by any means, so I'd mildly recommend DROP as a watch with the kind of people who love tossing themselves into wild scenarios, calling out their own escape plans, critiquing the movie's lapses in logic. Click play on a chill Friday night and I don't think you'll be so disappointed.

DROP is currently available to purchase in 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD formats at your favorite home video retailer. Thanks to Universal and Mandy Kay Marketing for the review copy!

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Film critic Megan Loucks, better known as Wonder Meg, comes on THE MOVIES to share who she is using only four films.

The Lansing, Michigan native and I chat about an encyclopedia of topics: motherhood, growing up in a tight-knit family, the Snyder Cut fandom (Meg co-founded Justice Con, an virtual charity convention that brought together Snyder Cut, DCEU, and comic book fans to raise money for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention), a lifelong devotion to fantasy stories, pillow fort architecture, the art of physical media collecting and so, so much more.

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Meg's four films:

LA BELLE ET LA BETE (1946) dir. Jean Cocteau (watch on Max or YouTube)

DO THE RIGHT THING (1989) dir. Spike Lee (watch on Netflix)

EXCALIBUR (1981) dir. John Boorman (watch on Internet Archive)

LADY BIRD (2017) dir. Greta Gerwig (watch on Max)

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Follow Meg on Instagram, YouTube. Read her interview with THE PENGUIN production designer Kalina Ivanov on Wonder Watchlist & other reviews on InSession Film.

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Thanks once again to Universal Pictures Home Entertainment for shipping me a review Blu-ray copy of THE WOMAN IN THE YARD!

This has been a good way to catch up on movies I missed in the theaters. The teaser for this movie sucked me in right away because it's simple: a family living at a farm house, with no neighbors as far as the eye can see and almost as far as the foot can walk...but then they see a creepy veiled woman, dressed in all black, sitting at the end of the driveway.

There's the thinnest veneer of civility in our daily lives. All it takes to send us into paranoid or hostile spirals is one uninvited person approaching our space. Shit, we really are just animals, aren't we?

Now imagine this person carries herself with the kind of calm yet firm demeanor reserved only for folks who know they can back up what they say. They can overpower you at any time and the only reason this movie doesn't end in five minutes is strictly due to the fact that they're not just here to rob or pillage or fight. There's something deeper going on.

This Woman (Okwui Okpokwasali) is here for Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler). She's the matriarch of a young family: young teen Taylor (Peyton Jackson) and elementary-aged Annie (Estella Kahiha). Ramona's husband has just died in a car accident; the movie starts with her getting around on crutches.

Taylor's trying to be the man of the house with the limited resources a 14-year-old has: no groceries, no license, no electricity. Bills pile up; Ramona lies in bed, rotting in her own mind. It's within this scenario the Woman arrives, revealing she knows more about Ramona and her family than any stranger ever should.

The movie plays out like a wind-up toy, setting up all the necessary pieces and letting the tension play out, watching Ramona and the kids try to figure a method of escape or deterrence. As the Woman grows closer, almost at the pace of shadows cast by a gliding Sun, secrets are revealed and Ramona's state of mind continues to warp, influenced by the Woman's otherworldly presence. Collet-Serra crafts genre set pieces that work as metaphors for Ramona's deteriorating mental illness, though leave me focused more so on how this works within the movie's world rather than how Ramona's mind is reflected within these scares.

I've always appreciated Deadwyler's gusto in pursuing a wide variety of projects (this to I SAW THE TV GLOW to THE PIANO LESSON, TILL and the upcoming siege thriller 40 ACRES carves a wide swath). She plays so much internal strife within her eyes and expressions; there's a woman who's fighting not only to survive, but also stave off this nagging reminder that she never wanted this kind of life. This isn't the plan she had for herself. It's hard not to wallow in self-pity. Deadwyler carries all of this in a way that never feels maudlin, always relatable.

The movie doesn't overstay its welcome, coming in at a breezy 88 minutes. Some sci-fi elements threaten to overstuff the story and I wish they'd been developed more throughout the movie rather than explained within the climax. Regardless, the movie, much like most of Collet-Serra's filmography sits at a comfortable 5-6 out of 10, perfect for a lazy Saturday afternoon.

The Blu-ray release? I can't understand why I'd pick up a "Collector's Edition" without so much as a commentary. The two featurettes into the making of the movie and design of the Woman are nice, but in 2025, falls below the standard for home video ownership.

Streaming's already made Blu-rays rarer and more expensive; this sparse set of bonus features wouldn't make me feel any better about dropping $20 for the disc. It shouldn't entice you to do the same.

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I interviewed John Maclean, the director of the coming-of-age samurai revenge movie TORNADO. The titular character is a teenage girl (Koki) avenging her father's murder at the hands of a band of thieves led by Sugarman (Tim Roth) and his son Little Sugar (Jack Lowden).

I swear I didn't mean for this episode to drop on Father's Day but it feels appropriate. The movie features two sets of father and child struggling with communication and good old-fashioned rebellion. It doesn't matter that Fujin (Takehiro Hira) nurtures and disciplines his daughter while Sugarman has left his son to fully grow into adulthood with little more than an idea of how to lead a group of ruffians. Either way, kids will roll their eyes. They'll pull a 180 to spite whatever you say.

Maclean and I discussed the importance of leading by example, the necessary shift of perspective from one who rejects their parents' tutelage to one who embraces it with warmth.

But don't worry, I didn't forget this is a samurai flick, spraying blood and sword-slashed limbs as Tornado's wind-blown hair shrouds her face in captivating mystery. You know I had to talk the Kurosawa influence, especially one shot that genuinely looks like an anime finisher.

This was a fun conversation. Maclean is a thoughtful guy, in love with so many different facets of what film has to reveal. I hope y'all enjoy this as much as I did recording it.

Pre-order TORNADO on Fandango at Home

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