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 Horror, Review, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Companion (2025) – Hearty

Released: 30th January
Seen: 21st April

One of the best things in a good horror film is a twist, a moment when the narrative takes a sharp left-hand turn out of seemingly nowhere and takes the audience on a thrill ride. There’s been a few recent horror films that have been spectacular at this, things like Barbarian where it set itself up as a film about two people stuck in an Airbnb overnight and ended up being one of the most demented films of the year or The Perfection which took the concept of a ‘twist” and dialled it up to 11 to see just how many twists it could fit into 90 minutes without the audience losing its mind. Today’s film, Companion, is a terrifically twisted take on the romance film that takes a few big swings and mostly makes them work.

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