leebutler Action, Comedy, Horror, Review, Sci-Fi

The Toxic Avenger (2025) – I Love You Toxie

Released: 29th August
Seen: 30th August

In 1984, a little independent film company known as Troma released a film that would change the course of the company forever. What started as a little low-budget horror film tentatively titled Health Club Horror would be released with the more memorable name The Toxic Avenger. To say that this film became a cult hit would be a massive understatement. The Toxic Avenger was the kind of cult hit that defined Troma. Toxie would turn into their official mascot and appear in several other movies. The Toxic Avenger would also turn up in other media, video games, comic books, a hit off-Broadway musical and even a Saturday morning children’s cartoon named The Toxic Crusaders. 40 years later and a certain subsection of the world still loves this big green freak in his torn up tutu, so much so that it almost feels inevitable that Hollywood was going to remake this little underground film because that’s just what happens to these cult films, someone will always try to recreate the lightning in a bottle that the original somehow had… so imagine my shock when they actually pulled off the magic trick of making this film work!

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leebutler Horror, Mystery, Review, Thriller

Clown In A Cornfield (2025) – Friendo Loves You

Released: 8th May
Seen: 24th August

In 2020, Adam Cesare released the young adult novel Clown in a Cornfield. The novel was a big success, ending up winning the Bram Stoker Award for Best Young Adult Novel and pretty much instantly getting optioned for a film. There would end up being 2 more novels written in the Clown in a Cornfield series over the years but the film took a little while to get made (probably because 2020 was not exactly a great time to try and film a movie, what with all the COVID hanging around) but eventually a little film called Clown in a Cornfield came out and made a brief splash before getting eclipsed by Final Destination: Bloodlines… which is a shame because it’s the kind of movie that deserves a lot more love.

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leebutler Horror, Mystery, Review

Weapons (2025) – Loaded

Released: 7th August
Seen: 23rd August

In 2022, the film Barbarian was released to an unsuspecting public. No one knew what it was about and audiences kept the core details quiet so everyone could be surprised but there was one thing that was pretty universally acknowledged by those who saw it… Barbarian was one of the best horror movies of 2022. That’s saying quite a lot, because 2022 is widely considered one of the best years for horror cinema in general. Hell, when I made my best-of list for 2022, a solid half of the list was horror films, with Barbarian being the highest on the list. After that movie I was truly excited and a little nervous to see what writer/director Zach Cregger would do for an encore… turns out he would go absolutely fucking insane and for that we thank him and ask him to do it again as soon as possible.

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leebutler Horror, Review, Thriller

Dangerous Animals (2025) – Bloody Good Time

Released: 12th July
Seen: 15th August

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, sometimes the simplest ideas done well make for the best movies. An elevator pitch, a single sentence concept played out to its absolute limit, is often a great way to ensure a fun, exciting film for the audience. This feels especially true regarding Horror films which can have concepts as basic as “Girl going through puberty has telekinetic powers” or “Man in mask stalks babysitters”…. Or, in the case of Dangerous Animals, “Shark obsessed serial killer goes on a spree”, and in its brutal brilliant simplicity you end up with one of the most gloriously fun horror films of the year.

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leebutler Drama, Mystery, Review, Thriller

Drop (2025) – Pick Me Up

Released: 17th April
Seen: 9th August

Every time a new technology comes out, it feels like it’s only a matter of time before the horror genre takes it on and plays with its darker elements. AI brought us M3GAN, mobile phones led straight to the novel Cell by Stephen King. This goes back to VHS’s ending up inspiring things like The Ring, so every new piece of tech can be used in a terrifying way. A pretty perfect piece of technology for this exact situation would be something like the airdrop, a way for someone to just anonymously drop an image or message onto your phone without needing to know your number. They don’t need to know who you are, you just have to be within range and then you can have whatever they want sent to you. Drop takes this idea of a mysterious man sending secret messages to someone and it is pulse-poundingly brilliant.

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leebutler Action, Comedy, Crime, Review, Thriller

Novocaine No Pain (2025) – Painless

Released: 13th March
Seen: 9th August

Congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP) is a rare medical condition that basically makes the person who is born with it (as it’s a genetic disease) unable to feel pain. On the one hand, this sounds like a great thing, a life without pain sounds good in theory, but in practice, it means that it’s easy to do things like bite off sections of your tongue or burn yourself without ever noticing you’re doing it. It’s the kind of medical condition that’s a favourite of strange medical shows because what show isn’t going to love a story about someone who doesn’t feel pain. It doesn’t seem to get much time in the sun when it comes to cinema, though, until Novocaine No Pain (which is what the movie Novocaine has been titled in Australia, for reasons that make no sense) which is possibly the first CIP Action Comedy and it’s just generally fantastic.

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leebutler Action, Adventure, Review, Sci-Fi

The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025) – Four-tunate!

Released: 24th July
Seen: 7th August

The Fantastic Four might be one of those cursed properties when it comes to movies as it seems like every version that’s been attempted has fallen into some kind of major problem. There was the initial attempt to make a movie back in 1994, which was made in order to maintain the rights and was never meant to be released (Go watch Doomed: The Untold Story of Roger Corman’s the Fantastic Four for more on that, but it was a fucking debacle). After that was the 2005 version, which is the version most people know but ended up being so cheesy and bad that its main legacy was to give Chris Evans a chance to reveal that he was Human Torch for a reference joke in the Deadpool & Wolverine movie. Lastly, there was Fan4stic, a 2015 gritty reboot that was so bad it made people think that the first family of Marvel just couldn’t be made into a film. Every 10 years they’ve tried and every 10 years they have failed to adapt this iconic quartet to film but now it’s time for the iconic Marvel Studios to have a try. After all, the first three adaptations were done by Roger Corman and Fox Studios, but the MCU hadn’t gotten their hands on it yet… and I don’t know what magic the MCU has that everyone else didn’t, but they finally got a version that works.

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