leebutler Horror, Review, Romance, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Leviticus (2026) – Holy

Released: 18th June
Seen: 30th October

The concept of conversion therapy is simple to understand in theory, the idea that people can be changed from gay to straight through “therapy’ is one that’s been around for years… in practice, it’s torture. It’s straight-up torture and there is no middle ground on this, people are made to watch gay porn while being electrocuted to create a link between the pain and the desire, they’re beaten until they decide to ‘be straight’ or they’re just raped until eventually they break. So many options to try and turn a queer person into a straight person, every single one of them is straight-up torture done by people who should be thrown in the darkest prison cell you can find and absolutely none of them actually work because the victim of this torture isn’t suddenly straight, they’re just traumatised and are repressing who they are to avoid being hurt. It’s a real-world horror that is thankfully illegal in several places, medically frowned upon in others and hopefully will one day be considered as horrific a practice as “Drilling a hole in someone’s head to relieve headaches”. It’s also a powerful topic that can make for a compelling drama if done well and Leviticus does it so well that it might be one of the best uses of this specific real-world horror.

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leebutler Comedy, Drama, Horror, Review, Romance, Thriller

Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma (2026) – Hawt

Released: 7th August
Seen: 26th October

The 80s slasher boom was an absolutely fascinating period of history when it comes to horror that can be looked at from so many angles. There’s the obvious business angle where films were effectively made by throwing darts at a calendar and making something around the date that it landed on, how many films essentially exist because the tax breaks in certain countries made them so cheap that it was almost like printing money or just how that era was a breeding ground for talent getting to break in with cheap films that could get high returns. Then there’s the actual stories of the films themselves, how the creation of the Final Girl inadvertently created a feminist icon, how these stories often revolved around sex and death being intertwined just as the AIDS crisis was ramping up or how they often took real-world fears and events and turned them up to an 11. For a genre filled with killer dolls, dream-based serial killers and a lot of summer camp hijinks, it is a surprisingly deep category of film that people have talked about a lot over the years since. Now it’s filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun’s turn to take us through their unique perspective of this period of cinema as a trans woman who clearly loved the genre of films that she’s pointing to with Teenage Sex & Death At Camp Miasma, even for all the parts of them that didn’t age well.

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leebutler Horror, Review, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Backrooms (2026) – Back To Yellow

Released: 28th May
Seen: 24th October

It all started with a single image posted to a forum in 2019. 4Chan, a site with a controversial reputation (to put it kindly), had a paranormal forum, and one day someone posted a single image. This image

A room with yellow wallpaper, seemingly empty with a strange pattern on the wallpaper, a carpetted floor that appears well worn and several overhead lights

This simple image of a strange set of rooms with mismatched off-yellow wallpaper and a carpet that looks like it’s made friends with every incontinent animal on the planet became known as The Backrooms, a piece of internet folklore (AKA A creepypasta) that soon took on a life of its own. It began as a series of stories, people making up an elaborate history for this world until a young filmmaker named Kane Parsons made a YouTube video that imagined what would happen if someone with a camera got lost in the Backrooms and something was coming after them. These became so popular that it was seemingly inevitable that they would lead to a movie being made about this liminal space; what was less inevitable was that the film would actually be good.

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leebutler Action, Comedy, Review

Stop! That! Train! (2026) – Ai Ai Captain!

Released: 13th August
Seen: 22nd September

February 2nd, 2009. That was the date that the first episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race aired on TV. At the time, it was almost a non-entity; it was effectively shot in the spare room at World of Wonder with a cast of Drag Queens no one had heard of, with a grand prize of 20K and some makeup and it aired on LogoTV. If you told anyone that this show would go on for 18 seasons, have a yearly All Stars spinoff, be franchised around the world and create superstars who would end up making world tours, appearing on multiple major TV shows and headlining Broadway, you would be insane, but that’s what happened. Drag Race gradually became a phenomenon, growing in scale to an absolutely insane degree that a feature film of some kind that utilised this talent pool was inevitable. With hundreds of drag queens who have proven just how insanely talented they are at World of Wonder’s disposal, it would be absolutely insane if they didn’t, at some point, try to use that talent pool to make a feature film and with Stop! That! Train! it feels like they’ve managed to figure out exactly what to do with the talent they have available because they made something that’s honestly better than it has any right being.

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

Coyote VS ACME (2026) – Miraculous

Released: 17th September
Seen: 17th September

If everything had gone according to the plans of the cinematic terrorist known as David Zaslav, this piece of art would’ve been thrown into a fire, and he would’ve been able to write off about 30 million in taxes for the Warner Brothers company. That was the plan; that was what the finish line for this film was going to be. It must be pointed out that films die all the time; they get stuck in development hell, or some disaster happens so that the people who started the film can’t complete it, or they finish the film but the company that made it goes bankrupt so the film can’t legally be released. A film being made but not being released is not an uncommon event; what is uncommon is a company making a film, getting great test screenings, and then deciding not to release it for a tax write-off that wouldn’t even cover two months of the CEO’s total salary package. What’s even less common is a film that went through this process to then get bought up by a competitor who actually releases the film into cinemas. That alone should make everyone want to support Coyote VS ACME purely as a middle finger to the absolutely brainless moron who thinks his minuscule tax break is somehow more important than a work of art that people gave up time in their precious lives to create. It also helps that Coyote VS ACME is, and boy does it feel good to say this, one of the best goddamn films of the year.

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leebutler Drama, Music, Review, Thriller

Mother Mary (2026) – Mother!

Released: 14th May
Seen: 9th September

When it comes to pop music, the genre largely belongs to women, and they manage to turn that light, fluffy, fun music into an absolute art form. From early icons like Madonna and Cher, to the 90s icons of Brittney Spears and Christina Aguilera, to the millennial iterations of Lady Gaga and Beyoncé, all the way up to the modern pop princesses like Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter, every generation gets a pop girlie or two that they can latch onto and call their own. They are often expected to give the world grand, elaborate performances to provide their bright bubblegum music a touch of heft; any deeper meaning or impact of their music often has to wait a few years for people to reevaluate it, and any mental anguish they may go through while being a pop icon is pushed down, hidden for people to find out about in tabloids years later. Witnessing a pop icon in trouble is almost a rite of passage, and Mother Mary gives us a pop icon going through the wringer and it really does work… until the ghosts show up.

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leebutler Comedy, Drama, Music, Musical, Review

Power Ballad (2026) – Charming

Released: 28th May
Seen: 8th September

It’s an undeniable truth that all music artists are influenced by other artists. All boy bands want to be The Beatles, all male artists are trying to steal some of Elvis’ swagger (and Elvis was just stealing from any black musician he knew of) and pretty much any modern female pop artist wants to be Madonna. It’s not hard to spot this, the entire music industry is built on people who are influenced by other artists and trying to express that influence in a way that doesn’t get them sued for copyright infringement. This is why you’ll see a lot of strange people getting writing credits on major songs, it’s weird that Right Said Fred are credited on a Taylor Swift song but she used the beat of their song I’m Too Sexy in her song Look What You Made Me Do so she has to give them credit… but what if she didn’t? What if a major artist just took a song from a struggling, lesser-known artist and just never gave them credit? Well, that would be the basic plot to the movie Power Ballad which has got its moments, but not as many as it should.

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leebutler Drama, Horror, Review, Sci-Fi

Saccharine (2026) – Sweetish

Released: 4th June
Seen: 23rd August

There is a term that is slowly becoming a little more well-known thanks to the invention of Ozempic and similar GLP-1 weight loss drugs known as Food Noise. The idea of food noise is just that someone is constantly thinking about food, even after they’ve eaten a meal and should rationally no longer be hungry. A lot of overweight people (myself included) know this noise well, as it’s that constant thinking of what to eat next that can become debilitating at times and is a phenomenon that’s finally starting to be talked about. Of course, it’s also inevitable that it can be taken and turned into the subject of a movie and it seems like the film Saccharine has decided to play around with the horror of such an idea, but in doing so appears to have bitten off a little more than it can chew.

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leebutler Documentary, Netflix, Review

Big Chicken: A Fast Food Conspiracy (2026) – Finger Licking Fine

Released: 5th August
Seen: 17th August

Some movies are best watched with some kind of gimmick, it’s hard to explain why, but it’s true. I remember in a documentary of midnight movies that Roger Ebert said he couldn’t imagine a more boring experience than seeing Rocky Horror at home instead of in a theatre with all the trimmings that made it a midnight movie classic. Just a few years ago we all went to see Barbie and Oppenheimer as a double feature because it was a great gimmick. Sometimes we just have a private joke that we have to indulge in to watch a movie, it’s as simple as that… anyway, I decided to watch Big Chicken: A Fast Food Conspiracy while eating a 6 piece chicken order from KFC because I was curious if the movie was going to shock me so much I could fight the urge to finish that chicken, because that notion amused me and will now be the foundational structure of my review.

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leebutler Comedy, Drama, Review, Romance

One Night Only (2026) – Celibate

Released: 6th August
Seen: 13th August

The year is 2013, and James DeMonaco makes his feature-length directorial debut with a film called The Purge. This is a big deal for James, because up to this point in his career James has mostly been a scriptwriter who got his start writing the script for Jack (that Robin Williams film about the boy who ages weirdly) but wasn’t really known for anything that special. He worked, certainly, but didn’t really get to make his mark. The Purge movie was going to make his mark; he wrote and directed it, got Ethan Hawke to star in his little low-budget horror film about a world where all crime, including murder, was legal for one night only; things were going well. Hell, the film made money, nearly 90 million on a 3 million budget. Everything should be going great… Unfortunately, the film got slaughtered in reviews.

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