leebutler Documentary, Netflix, Review

Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever (2025) – Eternally Average

Released: 1st January
Seen: 5th January

Bryan Johnson is a weird man, that’s the story you’ll find if you google him. A tech millionaire who has dedicated his life to the pursuit of immortality through a strict regimen that includes 100 pills, multiple high-end medical devices and plasma transfusions from his son. It’s an undeniably odd story on some level, there have been people obsessed over their health since the first vegan told everyone else how much they loved being vegan but Bryan Johnson is on his own unique level. Bryan truly seems to believe that the insane hard work that he’s doing will actually keep him from dying and the documentary Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants To Live Forever gives you a glimpse into his lifestyle… I might choose death over this option but to each their own.

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leebutler Editorial

Best Performances of 2024

Every year it’s remarkable how much a good performance can salvage a film. Your film can be a boring waste of time but a single great performance can make it worth watching. Every year film nerds love guessing who is going to be given the awards for Acting, those of us into horror are often left disappointed because our faves don’t win, but lists like this let us throw a tiny bit of praise out into the void and so that’s what we’re going to do here.

In normal years this list would be 20 entries long but this isn’t a normal year, I didn’t see my normal amount of films so this is only going to be 10 entries long but god damn are these some memorable entries. 1 entry per film, no honourable mentions this time, here we go.

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leebutler Editorial

The Best and Worst of 2024

2024 was something of a strange year for me personally when it came to this blog. Due to me actually getting a regular job there was a lot less time to see movies and write reviews (normally I’ve been seeing about 100+ films but this year the count is just a little over 40). Weirdly this is also the year this blog has had the most views which is a bit of a mixed bag. Hopefully next year I’ll be able to see a more normal number of films and provide a better set of end-of-year lists but this year I have to work with a much lower number. 

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leebutler Comedy, Horror, Review, Thriller

The Mouse Trap (2024) – ARRRRRRRRRRRRRGH

Released: 31st October
Seen: 28th December

This year, the leader of the club that’s made for you and me entered into the public domain. That’s right, Mickey Mouse is now officially available for use by anyone for any reason that they want as long as they only use things associated with the version of Mickey Mouse that can be found in the Steamboat Willie short (or in the two other shorts that came out that year, but the version you know is the Steamboat Willie version). This is a huge deal in terms of copyright laws, the reason that the public domain has been so empty for so many years can pretty much be explained by the reality that Disney never wanted Mickey to be in the public domain so they fought hard to keep him out of it but eventually, it had to happen, Mickey can now be put into any film or video game that you would dare to put him. As is tradition when big things like this enter the public domain, someone has to take it and turn it into a horror film as a symbolic gesture to show that no one owns this toy anymore, no one can stop you… someone should’ve stopped this, what the fuck did I just sit through?

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leebutler Adventure, Animation, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Review

Moana 2 (2024) – You’re Welcome

Released: 27th November
Seen: 15th December

In the screening for Moana 2 that I went to, the cinema was pretty packed with a ton of parents bringing their children to see the sequel to the 2016 original. Kids who were so young that it’s possible they weren’t even alive when the original Moana came out. These kids probably have only seen a handful of films in their life and one of them is going to be Moana 2, a formative feature film in their lives that will linger for a while as it introduces them to the magic of cinema. When you see little kids watching Moana 2 and see the joy it puts in their eyes, it’s kind of hard to say anything particularly negative about the film in general because it makes it clear how much it does not matter. The target audience does not care about critical reviews, they do not care about story structure or pacing because they’re just there to see this super awesome girl called Moana do some super awesome things and that’s great. I’m glad that Moana 2 is going to be a good first film for a lot of kids… I just wish it lived up to its potential to be a great first film.

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leebutler Horror, Review, Thriller

Heretic (2024) – GOD DAMN!

Released: 11th October
Seen: 21st November

“The only thing less trustworthy than a man who questions his faith is a man who does not”

~  Pope Leo XIV

The question of faith is perhaps the most personal question that one could ever be asked. What you believe happens when you shuffle off the great perch that is life is something that has puzzled people for centuries and has inspired art since the moment we worked out that if you mixed some dirt and water you could make a pretty picture out of it. Faith is also incredibly powerful when used in Horror films, as evidenced by the classic horror film The Exorcist. Of course, the Exorcist looked at the ideas of religion and faith and came down pretty hard on the side of “Yes there is a God and a Devil and you need God to help kick the Devil in the dick”. What about the idea of questioning faith? What about using doubt to help create horror… well, Heretic is here to do exactly that and it does so with glorious aplomb. 

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leebutler Fantasy, Musical, Review, Romance

Wicked: Part One (2024) – Green With Envy

Released: 1st August
Seen: 24th November

On October 30th 2003, the Gershwin Theatre presented the opening night performance of a little musical about a woman with green skin battling adversity and learning her true power through friendship with a hyperactive floating Barbie… that show was Wicked and to this day that show has captured audiences around the world. As of writing this sentence, it’s the second highest-grossing Broadway musical of all time, the fourth longest-running show in Broadway history and has been toured around the world so many times that it would be impossible to calculate just how many people have seen the show. It is a genre-defining artwork, one that has been talked about being turned into a movie since approximately 47 seconds after a movie producer heard Idina Menzel sing Defying Gravity for the first time and knew that this show needed to be captured on film… it’s taken them 20 years, it’s not the cast that they expected to get and it’s split a 2-hour-long stage show into two movies of 2+ hours each, but it looks like they absolutely nailed it.

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leebutler Horror, Mystery, Review, Thriller

Smile 2 (2024) – What’s The Use of Crying?

Released: 25th July
Seen: 9th November

So… how was your week?

For people who might stumble upon this in the future, this review is being written in the direct aftermath of America looking at a female prosecutor and a convicted felon who a court has determined to be a literal rapist who also has people who study the rise of Adolf Hitler going “Hey, this guy feels familiar” and decided to give the fascist the practically endless power of the United States presidency so I’ve been a little depressed lately (and I’m not even from the US so god knows how I’d feel if I had to live in the same country that did that). It’s been a hard week full of intense emotions with a lot of people just feeling like the world is crumbling around them… seems like a perfect time to go watch the sequel to a movie about how mental illness can drive you to the brink of suicide and beyond, because it seemed like a more fitting option than that cute looking movie about round robots who raise ducks.

Content warning, this film deals heavily with ideas of suicide and mental illness and those will need to be discussed in order to properly discuss this movie. If that is too much for you… this movie will be too much for you, there’s your review. If even reading this far has stirred up emotions, please call Lifeline on 13 11 14, or the service in your country.

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leebutler Drama, Horror, Review

The Substance (2024) – Substantially Brilliant

Released: 19th September
Seen: 19th October

In April 2015, the show Inside Amy Schumer aired an episode titled “Last Fuckable Day” which contained a sketch featuring Amy alongside iconic actresses Tina Fey, Julia-Louis Dreyfus and Patricia Arquette. In the sketch Amy comes upon Tina, Julia and Patricia celebrating Julia’s Last Fuckable Day, the day that an actress goes from being considered fuckable to just being considered an elderly woman reserved for mother roles. It’s a hilarious and scathing indictment of the very real agist sexism that pervades the entertainment industry and how it treats women. Over the years there’s been several ways to talk about the culture’s obsession with looks, youth and fuckability in the media. Still, for the longest time the strongest indictment I saw came from this silly mid-2010’s sketch comedy series… and now we have The Substance, proving that horror is still the best genre for exploring complex concepts like this.

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leebutler Horror, Review

Terrifier 3 (2024) – Merry Christ-mass Murder

Released: 11th October
Seen: 12th October

Two years ago something insane happened (in the world of cinema, something insane happens in the real world every other week lately). To the shock of almost everyone, a gonzo gorefest horror film was released worldwide in major cinemas and made over 15 million at the box office. Sure 15 million might not sound like a lot but when you’re made on a budget of 250K and are the sequel to an underground horror film that’s so extreme that even horror fans might wonder if it’s going too far, that’s wildly impressive. Terrifier 2 was an undeniable moment for horror, the moment we had to enter Art the Clown into the pantheon of great horror icons (and in general deliver one of the best performances of 2022. Since then, he’s only grown in popularity. He’s appeared in sitcoms, there’s merchandise with his horrific face all over it, and he’s a character in the latest Call of Duty game, it’s fair to say that he’s broken out of the underground and into the mainstream so it’s no shock that he would come back to the cinemas to remind us why Art the Clown is horror royalty.

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