Check Your Warranty

Film: Upgrade
Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on basement television.

I mentioned yesterday that the They Shoot Zombies list has recently updated. One of the things that happened with the new update is that a couple of movies that I reviewed on my monthly roundups now appear on the list as entries. This means a rewatch, something I’m not really looking forward to in terms of Psycho Goreman, but one I very much looked forward to with Upgrade. It’s been a couple of years since I watched Upgrade, and it’s a film I liked quite a bit the first time through.

It’s also a film that suffers slightly from the fact that it very much plays like a feature-length Black Mirror episode. It kind of speaks to the success of Black Mirror that any dystopic near-future science fiction can easily come across as an episode of the show. Upgrade is a bit more involved than a typical episode, but it wouldn’t shock me if this was at least temporarily conceived of as an episode for an early season.

Hungry Like the...

Film: The Wolf Man (2025)
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on basement television.

Aside from the studio execs at Universal, there are few people who want the Dark Universe project to succeed more than I do. I love the classic Universal monsters, and have watched most of the movies and sequels, and I even have some affection for the terrible movies in the sequences. Universal has had several abortive attempts to reboot the monsters. The current attempt is five movies in. I’ve now seen four of them, since I just watched The Wolf Man from this year.

This was kind of a make-or-break for me in a sense. The Tom Cruise version of The Mummy is absolute hot garbage. The rebooted The Invisible Man is as good as the Tom Cruise movie is bad (and that’s saying a lot). Abigail isn’t a great movie, but it’s a fun one, and that counts for something. I still haven’t seen Renfield. So, the Dark Universe is (for me so far) one clear win, one sort of win, and one absolute thrashing. The Wolf Man, then, would give me either a net-good or net-negative for the entire franchise at the moment.

Who Goes There?

Film: The Invisible Man (2020)
Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on various players.

The complete tanking of The Mummy reboot with Tom Cruise more or less killed the idea of Universal’s proposed reprise of/recreation of the Dark Universe inhabited by all of their old-school monster properties. Originally to star Johnny Depp, The Invisible Man was put on the back burner when The Mummy went south. In 2019, Universal decided for more one-off films rather than a united universe of creatures, and The Invisible Man was rebooted. It’s a damn good thing, too, because this is as good a horror/thriller as you’re going to find.

I don’t say that lightly. The Invisible Man is everything you might want from a complete reboot of the basic idea and the original premise combined with putting it in the modern world. The very basics—a man who can be invisible—is here, but everything else is different. It’s a very modern take, and one that might not have been as acceptable or accepted without the world having gone through the #MeToo movement.