Welcome to the Loony Labyrinth

Film: Dave Made a Maze
Format: Streaming video from Tubi on Fire!

You have to love it when someone comes up with a completely bonkers premise for a story and then pulls it off about as well as it could be done. Dave Made a Maze is a film that shouldn’t work. It’s marginally a horror movie, although the violence is clearly cartoonish and the blood is literally replaced with yarn and glitter. It’s a comedy because there is a lot of humor here, but it’s not really a horror comedy. The closest genre that it fits in is magical realism. We have characters who live in the real world but have an experience that cannot really be explained as anything other than magic. It’s just a hell of a lot weirder than the more standard magical realism films like Field of Dreams, Life of Pi, or Midnight in Paris.

Annie (Meera Rohit Kumbhani) comes home from a weekend to discover that her artist boyfriend Dave (Nick Thune) has built a small maze out of cardboard in the middle of their living room. Dave has a history of not completing projects, and the maze that he has created for him feels like a genuine breakthrough. The problem is, as he tells Annie, that he hasn’t finished the maze and he’s lost inside it. This seems patently ridiculous, as the maze appear to be about 20 square feet of cardboard boxes. When Annie tells him to just come out, he refuses to destroy the work, and also tells her that he’s lost inside the maze and can’t get out. Adding to the confusion, when Annie shakes the cardboard exterior of the maze, she can hear machinery and more rattling inside.

What I've Caught Up With, April 2026 Part 2

I finished three shows in April. The first was just catching back up on The Lincoln Lawyer, one of those rare cases where the show is better than the movie (although, to be fair, both are based off a series of books). I also finished Luke Cage, after rewatching the first season. My minor physical issues have cleared up, so I managed to complete Evil (aka: Catholic X-Files) a couple of weeks after initially intended. The new workout show is The Sopranos, which I’m finally getting to a mere three decades or so late.

What I've Caught Up With, April 2026 Part 1

I watched 33 movies in April, which means that in terms of the goal of 400 movies on the year, I was exactly on track—one movie per day, plus three movies. So, while I didn’t fall behind on that goal in April, I also didn’t catch up any. Baby steps, though, right? Treading water is better than falling further behind.

Life Happens

Film: If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You
Format: Streaming video from HBO on various players.

I’ve talked a little bit about what my life was like in 2025, but I haven’t really gone into a great deal of detail. It was the worst year of my life by a pretty good margin. When I had a conversation with my boss about what I had accomplished in 2025 with a look toward 2026, my answer was that my biggest accomplishment was that I hit all of my deadlines—all of my students’ papers and projects got back to them on time. There were a lot of times during the year where it felt like I was always on the edge of a complete breakdown—it was a combination of the events happening around me and the reactions of other people to those events in some cases. All of this brings me to If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You, a movie I don’t think I could have made it through had I attempted to watch it last year.

If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You (I’m going to shorten this to just the pre-comma part of the title for the rest of this) feels like a modern update of Diary of a Mad Housewife combined with the white anger film Falling Down. Linda (Rose Byrne, who was Oscar-nominated for this role and the reason I watched it) is a woman whose life is falling apart on every front. My situation last year was plenty bad, but I have nothing on Linda.

Appomattox

Film: Civil War
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on gigantic television.

It was only a matter of time before someone decided to project a new civil war onto the United States. The level of division is maddening and disturbing—there are states I’d rather not drive through right now, and some that I have driven through recently where I wasn’t exactly worried, but where I definitely felt out of place. Alex Garland’s Civil War feels like a worst-case scenario, but also feels unfortunately real.

We don’t actually get a great deal of background on the war that is being fought. We see the unnamed president (Nick Offerman) practicing a speech that feels a bit overblown and hyperbolic, especially since we soon learn that there are multiple successionist movements of varying strength and success, and the group commonly referred to as the Western Forces are rapidly approaching Washington D.C.

Zom-Rom-Com

Film: Life After Beth
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

I went into Life After Beth with a couple of clear reservations. The first is that I’ve never been entirely sold on Aubrey Plaza. I know I’m supposed to like her; she’s been marketed as someone who is emotionally detached in a cool way, sort of the live-action version of Daria. The second issue is Dane DeHaan, an actor who has one of the most slapable faces I have seen. DeHaan reeks of smugness to me. That might be unfair, but it’s also true that the first couple of movies I saw him in, I disliked, so my dislike of him is at least there for a reason.

And yet, Life After Beth beckoned. It’s a zombie movie, one of my favorite subgenres, especially considering how much has been done with it over the years (I see you shaking your head; we’ll get there). It’s also clearly a romance that is going to end badly, something else I tend to appreciate. Finally, it’s a movie that clearly wants to have fun with the premise. This is a horror movie with a cast of comic actors. So, while the two stars are actors I don’t tend to like as much as I’m supposed to, there was a lot here that drew me in.

Drilling Down

Film: The Loved Ones
Format: DVD from Rock Island Public Library through interlibrary loan on gigantic television.

I don’t enjoy the torture porn subgenre of horror, and I don’t seek out gore for the sake of gore. My preferences in the horror genre are more psychological than anything else, and while I don’t tend to shy away from gore, for me, it works when it’s plot-necessary. I think it works better when it’s used in small amounts and when it’s implied. So movies that involve any amount of torture are always going to be ones that I hesitate to watch. It’s one of the reasons that I’ve waited this long to see highly acclaimed Aussie horror film The Loved Ones. I knew enough of what I was getting into to wonder if this was going to be extremely troubling.

The Loved Ones is a film that contains some gore elements but also tends to keep the most brutal aspects off camera. It’s also a film where the torture is extremely plot-relevant. In fact, that torture is very much the point of the film. Normally, this would be a reason for me to wonder what I was doing through the entire short run time, but in this case, what happens is surprisingly tasteful for a horror movie from a first-time feature-length director.