It’s a variety of different types of slashers, each of them with (sometimes oddly) erotic elements, but that didn’t make my latest triple feature any better. Let’s find out what went wrong.
SPIN THE BOTTLE (2024)
A teen supernatural slasher that runs over 2 hours long. WHY? There is no excuse for this.
In the 1970s, a group of friends is hanging out at one girl’s house, and they decide to play spin the bottle…in the basement…which turns out to be an occult lair…with a pentagram on the floor…which they sit around to play the game…with a bottle the girl warns is her father’s prized possession…
In modern times, we meet our main teen guy, who is going on ahead to the house he will be moving into with his mother, played by Ali Larter. Right here is one of those moments when the film could have been edited down. Their situation is established in a conversation before he leaves, and then we get another conversation between them when he arrives at the house, which adds absolutely nothing new of value.
He quickly makes a group of friends at school and invites them to the house. The kids know of the house’s history, so naturally they decide they should play spin the bottle in the basement…with the same bottle. On a side note, I don’t understand this recent trend of filming movies in the super long and narrow 2:35:1 aspect ratio. Perfect opportunities to capture the bottle sitting in the middle of the full pentagram are hampered by the squished height of the picture size.
In a typical moment of catering to a straight, male audience, while playing, two guys laugh off the idea of kissing when the bottle signals that they are supposed to, but when it’s two girls, they don’t hesitate in going for it and getting into it. Yawn.
Anyway, the kids release a ghost of the girl who lived in the house in the 1970s, and she begins terrorizing them, and very occasionally killing them. Justin Long appears as the sheriff who investigates the mounting deaths.
Once again, there’s a repetitive segment, this time at a funeral for one of the kids, which simply needed to get to the point but takes way too long to do so, with scenes both at the grave and in the church. We really didn’t need to attend the entire funeral of a dead character in a slasher movie.
Finally, the remaining kids decide to delve into the backstory of the house. They talk to a reverend and learn they must get the demon back in the bottle. It’s only briefly in the final act that the movie gets to the point—all the kids in the house together being hunted by the ghost girl, who sucks their souls out through their mouths. If only the film had been 30 minutes shorter and this section about 20 minutes longer, this could have been an okay teen supernatural slasher.
I HEART WILLIE (2025)
It’s another killer Mickey Mouse movie, and it begins with some homoerotic torture porn. Yay!
Then we meet a small group of goth kids that likes to go to macabre locations. They head to the infamous lair of the famous “Steamboat Willie” character, who one of the girls loves.
They spend a lot of time roaming around the property in the dark, both inside and out, with some of them going off to have sex. This is 43 minutes in and when things finally pick up. Our shirtless Mickey begins hunting, abducting, and absolutely torturing everyone in his lair.
The big surprise is when we discover just how much the main girl really loves Steamboat Willie, but even that is not enough to save this poorly paced slasher. At least it’s gritty and grisly.
KARMA (2025)
The only thing that kept me watching this one was one hot guy who spends most of the time shirtless.
Otherwise, it’s a dialogue-heavy bore.
Four years ago, a group of friends accidentally killed a girl during a prank gone wrong. Now they start getting “I know what you did” type notes. But first, there’s a bunch of banter between them that feels unscripted, pointless, and just an excuse for them to all call each other the n word repeatedly for nearly 25 minutes.
It’s 50 minutes before we get the first major kill, and it’s a 2fer. The killer wears a robe and mask, but don’t expect any suspense, chases, or death scenes. The best part of the few kills we do get is the reaction by a white guy as he’s dying.
65 minutes in there’s an anticlimactic reveal of the killer, who has everyone tied up on a stage and just tortures and kills them for the remainder of the film…after talking for like 20 minutes. Yawn.
Would you believe the movie ends with a maniacal laugh outburst?
