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 Horror, Review

The Monkey (2025) – Monkeying Around

Released: 21st February
Seen: 29th May

It is a truth universally accepted by anyone who is cool that Stephen King is the greatest horror author of the last 50 years. His stories are modern classics, transforming the way horror books are viewed in the literary world and serving as the foundation for some of the greatest films of the last several decades. He is a truly prolific author with over 65 novels and 200 short stories under his pen and by the time I’ve posted this specific review he will have undoubtedly added to that (To repeat George R.R. Martin’s question to Stephen King “How the fuck do you write so many books so fast?”). He’s also infamous for taking basic everyday things and making them terrifying. This is such a well-known thing that it served as the foundation for a pretty great cutaway gag from an early episode of Family Guy, where Stephen King tried to sell his publisher on the idea of a book about a cursed lamp. It’s a Stephen King classic, take a basic thing we’ve all seen and twist it into something terrifying. For his 1980 short story The Monkey, he did this by taking a wind-up monkey toy that would clash a pair of cymbals and made it into a mysterious force of evil that led to elaborate, brutal deaths. Now, in 2025, the director Osgood Perkins took that idea and ran with it to bring us The Monkey, a high-energy horror comedy that is one of the most exciting films of the year.

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leebutler Comedy, Horror, Review

Screamboat (2025) – Oh Boy!

Released: 2nd April
Seen: 26th May

On the 28th of December last year, I subjected myself to the absolutely horrific piece of garbage known as The Mouse Trap which had the distinct honour of being the first horror film to take advantage of the fact that Steamboat Willie entered the public domain. That film was so god awful that it made it to the top of my worst of the year list, an honour it would’ve gotten even if last year was a normal year for me where there were 10 films on such a list. It was a truly putrid film that was the perfect example of a film made to cheaply cash in on something being public domain. No cleverness, no joy, just a shitty generic slasher with a Mickey Mouse mask on because you could legally get away with it. At the end of my review of that “film” I pointed out that the next film that was going to play with the idea of Mickey Mouse as a killer would be called Screamboat and all I wanted was for it to be somewhat better than The Mouse Trap was…well, Screamboat is the exact film I was hoping for when I heard that they were making a horror movie about Steamboat Willie.

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leebutler Horror, Mystery, Netflix, Review, Thriller

Fear Street: Prom Queen (2025) – Down With Prom

Released: 23rd May
Seen: 24th May

In 2021, a horror film event happened that really showed the potential for what could be done with a streaming platform that wanted people to notice what it was releasing. Over the course of three weeks Netflix released the Fear Street Trilogy, a set of horror films inspired by the R.L. Stine books that all took place in different time periods, played around in different eras of the horror/slasher genre, and all connected to create a grand overarching story. It was dark, twisted, queer and just a ton of fun. I even named the entire trilogy as one of the best films of 2021, which is a choice I stand by because every single entry did something truly great within the slasher genre. They were films that understood what makes the genre fun and their success as an event pretty much guaranteed that there was going to be more. When they announced that we were going to get a new entry with the subtitle Prom Queen, this reviewer was excited at the prospect… never be excited about things, it leads to disappointment.

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leebutler Horror, Review

Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025) – Dead Perfect

Released: 15th May
Seen: 24th May

The Final Destination franchise has straight up ruined an entire generation of people. Don’t believe me, find a person born roughly around 1985-1990 and put them on a highway with a single log truck within their field of vision and I can guarantee you they will have a panic attack and pull the car off the road because they vividly remember the opening of the second movie. For years the Final Destination series was a Horror movie joyride, a franchise built around the idea of one person having a premonition of a major accident with a death toll in the hundreds and getting their friends and a few strangers out in time to avoid it. Naturally, death would take out those remaining victims in a very specific order using Rube Goldberg devices of death that would end in some truly insane sequences. For 5 films between 2000 and 2011, audiences were treated to a glorious wave of catastrophic carnage but it felt like that was going to be it. Sure there were talks about reviving the franchise for years but it never happened so it became a nostalgia property for a specific generation of people… and now thanks to Final Destination: Bloodlines, this campy little franchise is back for more and it’s truly glorious.

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leebutler Comedy, Horror, Mystery, Review

Heart Eyes (2025) – Love

Released: 13th February
Seen: 13th May

The Holiday Slasher is an idea that basically defined the boom period of the slasher genre back in the 80s, the idea being that a producer could just pick any random holiday and make a movie around it. This simple idea led us down the rabbit hole of My Bloody Valentine, Leprechaun, Silent Night Deadly Night, Thanksgiving and about a hundred other horror films of varying quality. Of course, lately there’s been a lot less of this kind of film, mostly because every holiday was already handled by a film from the 80s, so there’s not much new territory to tread on here. If you can’t do something new though, at least do something fun, and Heart Eyes is doing something very fun.

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leebutler Comedy, Drama, Horror, Review

The Ugly Stepsister (2025) – Cinder-hell-a

Released: 9th May
Seen: 11th May

The story of Cinderella is one that’s been told more times than anyone would be insane enough to count. It’s been animated, it’s been turned into multiple musicals, it’s been parodied and referenced and put in every position that the insane creative mind can consider. It’s even been the subject of many horror films over the years, which makes sense considering the Brothers Grimm iteration of the story is particularly brutal. Indeed several major versions of the story lean into some pretty violent imagery, the Into The Woods version of the story has the stepsisters cutting off their heels in a direct reference to the Brothers Grimm while the Revolting Rhymes version by Roald Dahl had the prince lopping off heads, so this is a story that’s perfect for a horror retelling. The Ugly Stepsister tackles the story from the genre of Body Horror and does a beautiful job at it.

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leebutler Action, Drama, Horror, Review, Thriller

Sinners (2025) – Hellishly Great

Released: 17th April
Seen: 10th May

Ryan Coogler is one of the most surprising directors in recent years. After breaking onto the scene with Fruitvale Station, Ryan was handed the keys to two important pieces of cinematic IP. The first was Creed, a spin-off from the Rocky franchise that absolutely made him into a mainstream figure, which he then was able to use to helm Black Panther and Wakanda Forever, cementing him as a masterful blockbuster director that should not be underestimated. Of course most of his work is in known IP, in franchises people previously knew but hadn’t yet been able to actually go for broke with something original… until now, thanks to his absolute barn burner of a horror film Sinners which should cement Ryan Coogler as one of the best directors of this generation.

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leebutler Horror, Review

Wolf Man (2025) – Hairy

Released: 16th January
Seen: 25th April

On May 22nd 2017, Universal announced that it was launching a new franchise that would feature all of their legendary movie monsters in a shared universe. It was intended to culminate in a grand team-up, The Avengers of horror to be combined into a little franchise known as the Dark Universe. Their inaugural movie was 2017’s The Mummy starring Tom Cruise, and it bombed so hard that the Dark Universe as a concept was dead by June 10th (the day after the release). No one wanted to touch this franchise, it had so royally fucked itself that the entire concept of these legendary horror creatures was gone… right up until someone thought to try again but without the gimmick of a team up, just make some good films with these characters.

The first one off the line was The Invisible Man in 2020, which is still one of the best horror films of the last decade. Its writer/director, Leigh Whannell, had managed to modernise the horror legend and make it something special so when the announcement came out that Leigh was going to try it again with Wolf Man, it was hard not to be excited. Now, this isn’t a failure on the level of The Mummy, but it’s not an undeniable legend like Invisible Man either.

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